Autobiographies of great achievers

[Rose65]

I marvel at the long detailed biographies by many
great human beings.
They not only achieve so much but find time to write in minute detail about everything. How do they recall so many detailed conversations, places, people, events? Often they write prolifically on other subjects too. I mean when do such people even sleep!

Do they really have the same 24 hours a day as everyone else? I have had my share of dramas, ups and downs as anyone, but it exhausts me to even think of writing about it all! That would mean reliving it and once was quite enough thankyou.

Think of greats like David Attenborough, Michael Palin's travels. Of journalists who are globetrotting well into old age. I wonder these days if certain celebrities even see their homes and families.

Winston Churchill is an example as he lived an incredible life and still wrote so many books.

Sometimes I look on Wikipedia about great lives and it's tiring just to read the lists of achievements.

 

[hollydolly]

Yep I often wonder how they can possibly remember so much detail.... which is why I take most Biographies with a grain of salt

 

[feywon]

Yep I often wonder how they can possibly remember so much detail.... which is why I take most Biographies with a grain of salt

i'm cautious about biographies as well, and bios ghost written with the person's name on it as if they wrote it. A diligent biographer would have a more monumental task in that they'd have take varying accounts of incidents figure out where the 'truth' lies or an engaging way to present different versions and let the reader decide. This why i will take into consideration the way other people remember the subject of the autobiography in their own writings. i went thru a period of reading a lot of bios of actors/actresses from the classic old movies i watched TV as a teen. So a few times i read more than one version of the same incident from the perspectives of various people who were involved.

But we all know from our own families that each person present at some memorable event will have their own perspective on it. For one things siblings are not always treated equitably by parents, and so the scapegoat may remember the parent very differently than the scapegoat. Thankfully not all families assign such roles to their kids (and those that do usually argue that they don't, where those that don't might
worry that they might have done so unintentionally.

All of us forget some things and 'embellish' others. The forgetting is often things on opposite ends of spectrum between 'was inconsequential' and 'devastatingly traumatic'. Deliberate redundancy there because i've known people who remember a good deal about various traumas in their lives, yet resist remembering the worst things. They can tell you surrounding facts but do not themselves draw the logical conclusion to be derived from those facts. Oh, and another area of 'forgetting' is things that don't fit the narrative in our heads about what kind of person we are. The degree of forgetting for this reason varies widely between individuals. And we tend to embellish the things that fit our own self-image.

 

[Alligatorob]

Do they really have the same 24 hours a day as everyone else? I have had my share of dramas, ups and downs as anyone, but it exhausts me to even think of writing about it all! That would mean reliving it and once was quite enough thankyou.

Yep I often wonder how they can possibly remember so much detail.... which is why I take most Biographies with a grain of salt

I think most of us are quite good at remembering how we wish things had gone or were, I think a lot of that is at work.

i'm cautious about biographies as well, and bios ghost written with the person's name on it as if they wrote it.

Yep, I suspect some of them never even read it.

 

[hollydolly]

Couldn't agree more , Feywon ^^^^... for example as a child I was in and out of foster care and childrens homes, while in between living with my parents. I can only remember the things that stood out for me ..some things that were particularly traumatic.. or out of the ordinary... there's no way I can remember the minutei.. of every day life..

Take the day I first stared school.. I remember it was raining and I was wearing a new yellow sou'wester.. and the children who were starting with me were all crying.. except me who sat there wondering what all the fuss was about .. in retrospect I know it was because I'd already previously been in a foster home so I wasn't phased by this impending separation.. however that's where that memory ends..unlike these biographers..I couldn't tell you the name of the teacher.. or the kids in class.. or what we were taught.. or if my mother kissed me goodbye....and in reality who could at 5 or 6 years old ?