Write Your Autobiography

Wrap-up

Good autobiographies make for great reading. Are they always 100% true? Often writers take liberties with their stories to make a good story even better. It’s up to you to make the tale worth telling.

In this lesson you:

• Read excerpts from autobiographies and answered questions about them
• Organized lists of events in chronological order
• Wrote paragraphs for your own autobiography

On your own:

• Continue gathering ideas for your own autobiography. Sit in a quiet place with a notebook and write down all of the things you remember about your life.
• At the end of the day, make a list of what you did that day. Practice recording the details, such as the taste of your food, the smells as you go to work, and the sounds you hear throughout the day. Put the list in chronological order.
• Pick a famous person whose life you would like to know more about. Go to the library and see if the person has written an autobiography. If not, choose an autobiography by someone else.
• Here is a short list of really good autobiographies:
  • The Autobiography of Ben Franklin
  • The Autobiography of Malcolm X
  • Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama
  • Gandhi: An Autobiography
  • I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
  • The Liar’s Club by Mary Carr
  • One Writer’s Beginnings by Eudora Welty
  • Beautiful Joe: An Autobiography of a Dog