As a kid there where two kinds of literature that I devoured.

Those books that taught me about a subject I craved to understand and those that shared a detailed accounting of how someone either created the subject matter or who aggregated it well enough to create something new. I always favoured the raw content until I found it indigestible without the context of the human perseverance that lead to the understanding.

On occasion, I come up with a point of view or frame of reference that a few close friends find interesting either by way of provocation or enlightenment. Often my efforts to explain my conclusions require me to self examine the trail of bread crumbs that lead me to a conclusion. Most often I find reinforcement, but sometimes the need to refactor.

It is this struggle to figure out how I became me, with all my filtered perceptions and my intrinsic situational interpolation that I have come to realize that every autobiography I have ever read, was at best, a collection of well intentioned lies and filtered truths.

Some write diaries to help them with their essay of self. Most diaries are written in a second person narrative, usually to a future self as motivational or in the voice of wishful thinking. Some are written for posterity, and willingly neglect details that don’t support the intended projection of idealism. Perhaps the only diaries that are historically relevant are those which unintentionally document a historical event (such as Anne Frank’s).

It is now a well documented phenomena that the simple act of recalling a memory, modifies that memory. Our water laden, squishy and pliable synaptic memory banks are not all that different from the ferrite core memories in the very first computers. The act of recalling information always has a side effect in the re-persisting of that information. Only recently has the legal system begun to accept the problem of memory modification through and by the science that was once was believed to be entirely therapeutic counselling.

I can’t remember reading a person’s autobiography who didn’t recall some life changing event before the author was 10. As we get older, the frequency of new experiences slows proportionately to the sense that time accelerates. I recall many life changing events from the age of 3 to the age of 9. None of which are accurate, but the perception of which continue to have a profound influence upon me.

Its as if the early and most momentous events in our lives are given some kind of force multiplying coefficient whose exponent is time.

I’m not really bothered by having been mislead by all the authors of all the great autobiographies I have enjoyed, nor by whose fanciful tales I measured myself as being somewhat deficient in some regard.

But I am relieved that as I am now somewhat more aged and nearer to being their peers in having lived while struggling to retain clarity on my earliest memories, I can see the wink across time by all those great contributors to the understanding of the human condition that shrugs and says, “well that’s how I remember it”.