ABSTRACT
Life writing is a relatively new term that refers to many types of writing based on a person’s life. It has an inherent relationship to traditional autobiography, but it is more inclusive and reflects major shifts in the cultural, critical and geopolitical landscape (→ Geopolitics, II/34). The autobiographical impulse lies at the root of the life writing enterprise without privileging one genre or lived experience over another. This equalitarian function, its ability to adapt, and a sense of moral urgency accounts for the extraordinary popularity of life writing today, or the “memoir boom,” as it is often referred to. Since it is impossible to view life writing through a coherent frame, life writing today derives from diverse historical projects, critical idioms and forms of human activity that are not organized around a single center.
