Autobiographical Themes

I am in a lower division fiction writing class and was reading my textbook, which I had been putting off and groaning about. I was reading and something hit me in correlation with autobiography or any writing in fact.

“An author no less than a reader or a critic can see an emerging pattern, and the author has both the possibility and the obligation of manipulating it. When you have to put something on the page, you have two possibilities, and only two: You may cut it or you are committed to it. Gail Godwin asks:

But what about the other truths you lost by telling it that way?
Ah, my friend, this is my question too. The choice is always a killing one. One option must die so that the other may live. I do little murders in my work room everyday.”

This quote reminds me of what we talked about in class last week. We were talking about Augustine and other autobiographies. Sometimes the authors change what really happened to tie one little thing to the big picture of the book. One example of this is Augustine’s gardens. He had many powerful moments in gardens throughout his life. Were they real or did he add the gardens to bring out the themes of his heart? Does it even really matter? No.