Autoboyography Review

[Gracia Bradshaw]

Itturns out, Tanner is only partly right: four months is a long time. After all, it takes only one second for him to notice Sebastian Brother, the Mormon prodigy who sold his own Seminar novel the year before and who now mentors the class. And it takes less than a month for Tanner to fall completely in love with him.

When I read reviews for Autoboyography, I had expected a cute and fluffy story that would melt my heart. Autoboyography follows Tanner, a bisexual teen, who enrols in a class to draft a novel in a semester and meets Sebastian Brother, a Mormon prodigy, and is about the undeniable attraction the two boys share. A queer romance that was hyped up to be adorable and heart-melty and lovely? I was on board immediately.

Listen, I really did wish that I loved this book, because nothing brings me more joy than queer kids being happy and finding love. Unfortunately, I really struggled to get past these issues. This book was just not for me at all.

A last note before closing: If you are bi, gay, and/or religious, and you felt seen by this book and its representation, then that is absolutely valid and it is not my intent to take that away from you or undermine your feelings towards this book, its characters, and the romance. I am open to respectful discussion about this book and my interpretation of this book with readers and other book reviewers.

Hi Taiwo!

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and your perspective. I suppose I am glad I am not the only one who picked up on how this book is a bit icky.

Thank you for the kind words! ?

Hi Ivy!

Thank you so much for sharing your perspective with me! I do agree with you. I liked Autumn as a character, but I really felt like the story did her dirty towards the end and took away her agency as a character.

Welcome to our new home! Due to our move, any links prior to today will no longer work. Don't worry, if you missed out, we will be sharing again! If you are looking for a particular review or interview, use the search tool and you will be able to find. Thanks for reading!

The word "autobiography" was first used deprecatingly by William Taylor in 1797 in the English periodical The Monthly Review, when he suggested the word as a hybrid, but condemned it as "pedantic". However, its next recorded use was in its present sense, by Robert Southey in 1809.[2] Despite only being named early in the nineteenth century, first-person autobiographical writing originates in antiquity. Roy Pascal differentiates autobiography from the periodic self-reflective mode of journal or diary writing by noting that "[autobiography] is a review of a life from a particular moment in time, while the diary, however reflective it may be, moves through a series of moments in time".[3] Autobiography thus takes stock of the autobiographer's life from the moment of composition. While biographers generally rely on a wide variety of documents and viewpoints, autobiography may be based entirely on the writer's memory. The memoir form is closely associated with autobiography but it tends, as Pascal claims, to focus less on the self and more on others during the autobiographer's review of their own life.[3]

Spiritual autobiography is an account of an author's struggle or journey towards God, followed by conversion a religious conversion, often interrupted by moments of regression. The author re-frames their life as a demonstration of divine intention through encounters with the Divine. The earliest example of a spiritual autobiography is Augustine's Confessions though the tradition has expanded to include other religious traditions in works such as Mohandas Gandhi's An Autobiography and Black Elk Speaks. Deliverance from Error by Al-Ghazali is another example. The spiritual autobiography often serves as an endorsement of the writer's religion.

A memoir is slightly different in character from an autobiography. While an autobiography typically focuses on the "life and times" of the writer, a memoir has a narrower, more intimate focus on the author's memories, feelings and emotions. Memoirs have often been written by politicians or military leaders as a way to record and publish an account of their public exploits. One early example is that of Julius Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, also known as Commentaries on the Gallic Wars. In the work, Caesar describes the battles that took place during the nine years that he spent fighting local armies in the Gallic Wars. His second memoir, Commentarii de Bello Civili (or Commentaries on the Civil War) is an account of the events that took place between 49 and 48 BC in the civil war against Gnaeus Pompeius and the Senate.

The term "fictional autobiography" signifies novels about a fictional character written as though the character were writing their own autobiography, meaning that the character is the first-person narrator and that the novel addresses both internal and external experiences of the character. Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders is an early example. Charles Dickens' David Copperfield is another such classic, and J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye is a well-known modern example of fictional autobiography. Charlotte Bront's Jane Eyre is yet another example of fictional autobiography, as noted on the front page of the original version. The term may also apply to works of fiction purporting to be autobiographies of real characters, e.g., Robert Nye's Memoirs of Lord Byron.

In antiquity such works were typically entitled apologia, purporting to be self-justification rather than self-documentation. The title of John Henry Newman's 1864 Christian confessional work Apologia Pro Vita Sua refers to this tradition.

One of the first autobiographies written in an Indian language was Ardhakathānaka, written by Banarasidas, who was a Shrimal Jain businessman and poet of Mughal India.[8] The poetic autobiography Ardhakathānaka (The Half Story), was composed in Braj Bhasa, an early dialect of Hindi linked with the region around Mathura.In his autobiography, he describes his transition from an unruly youth, to a religious realization by the time the work was composed.[9] The work also is notable for many details of life in Mughal times.

The earliest known autobiography written in English is the Book of Margery Kempe, written in 1438.[10] Following in the earlier tradition of a life story told as an act of Christian witness, the book describes Margery Kempe's pilgrimages to the Holy Land and Rome, her attempts to negotiate a celibate marriage with her husband, and most of all her religious experiences as a Christian mystic. Extracts from the book were published in the early sixteenth century but the whole text was published for the first time only in 1936.[11]

Possibly the first publicly available autobiography written in English was Captain John Smith's autobiography published in 1630[12] which was regarded by many as not much more than a collection of tall tales told by someone of doubtful veracity. This changed with the publication of Philip Barbour's definitive biography in 1964 which, amongst other things, established independent factual bases for many of Smith's "tall tales", many of which could not have been known by Smith at the time of writing unless he was actually present at the events recounted.[13]

Following the trend of Romanticism, which greatly emphasized the role and the nature of the individual, and in the footsteps of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, a more intimate form of autobiography, exploring the subject's emotions, came into fashion. Stendhal's autobiographical writings of the 1830s, The Life of Henry Brulard and Memoirs of an Egotist, are both avowedly influenced by Rousseau.[15] An English example is William Hazlitt's Liber Amoris (1823), a painful examination of the writer's love-life.

Check out my review of Autoboyography by Christina Lauren, their young adult romance between a high schooler and his teaching assistant, to see if this is a romance worth reading.

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INFO 265-10 will be available beginning January 23, 2020, at 6 am Pacific unless you are taking an intensive or a one-unit or two-unit class that starts on a different day. In that case, the course will be open on the first day that the class meets.

Prepare for a wondrous, delight-filled, and informative journey into young adult** materials: fiction, nonfiction, graphic novels, movies, TV series, and more! This course will engage students in multiple formats of young adult materials; students will read, watch, and listen, and the preponderance of materials will be student-selected. By the end of the course, students will be well-versed in YA materials and will have an understanding of young adults' information-seeking behaviors and developmental needs and how those materials meet their needs. As with any worthwhile endeavor, the effort students put into the course will directly impact the benefits.

As part of the course, students will read two recently published novels together; for each of these two novels, students will have a chance to "meet" the authors at live Zoom sessions. Two additional Zoom sessions are scheduled; at the first, students will have the chance to hear about and share their own favorite YA titles and discuss trends with a panel of YA librarians. At the second, students will have the opportunity to engage with a young adult graphic novel expert. Note: It is highly recommended that students attend these live sessions, but recordings will be available for mandatory viewing; dates for these sessions will be available in Canvas.

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