I have to write this literacy autobiography for my English class. The assignment is pretty easy, just come up with some prose about how reading and writing made me the person I am today. I have to use a synecdoche like thirty sails coming over the horizon to represent thirty boats.
The sails in my autobiography are The Pickwick Papers. But writing about one book isn’t an autobiography. I question how broad I should be in listing what I’ve read and written. Maybe I’ll just mention what I was reading at the time I heard the book for the first time and a little bit about what I read the few years before Dickens, and a little bit more about what I read and wrote during the many years after first hearing about Mr. Pickwick. How will I be focused but comprehensive?
The challenge in writing the autobio is not to sound fake and trite. I don’t want to overdo the “vocation to become a teacher after having read the book” theme that could damage the final paper. I’d also like to avoid harping on the difficult family situation at the time of hearing the book read to me by one of my favorite teachers, Mrs. Perry.
The fantasy that was engendered in me in sixth grade while hearing the book read to me was that I could travel, like the members of the Pickwick Club, and meet interesting people and see new places and things and report back to an admiring group about my adventures. Should I write poetically that the adventures of the Pickwick Club made me an incessant traveler, fascinated by any new place just because I’ve never been there before?
How insistent should I be when writing that I decided to become a teacher as I sat in Mrs. Perry’s sixth grade class listening to my first exposure to one of the giants of English Lit? I’ve told the story to myself and others for so long that I don’t know if it’s true anymore. Even if the story is an exaggeration I still like it and I going to stick to it.
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