When I was in my mid-twenties and living in London, I often used to plan an alternative autobiography in my head as I was walking to work. In this autobiography, there would have been no personal narrative - no dates, no sequence of life events or achievements. Instead, each chapter would have given an objective description of a particular strong influence on my life.
I already had outlines in my head for sections on my family history, the local geography and social history of Tilburg, my education, my relationships, the books I had read and loved, and the ups and downs of Willem II football club. Somehow, the reader would get an impression of the person that was sitting, hiding, at the centre of all these things, gradually being revealed as more pieces of the jigsaw fell into place.
Needless to say, this idea for a subjectless autobiography just stayed in my head and never saw the light of day. Real life takes over, and the reimagination of your own life slowly dissolves.
Thirty years later, there are thousands of such anti-autobiographies out on the web, as people publish fragments of their lives through social media: each Facebook, Twitter or blog posting reveals the likes and dislikes of their authors, what they are doing at that very moment, who they relate to and how they relate to them. And yet, they remain shadowy fleeting presences in cyberspace, evading any attempt to grasp who they really are.
If you were to follow a web author's every internet posting for a few years, you would be able to create one of many possible biographies of that person as you make a collage of their random texts, messages and photographs as they communicate their existence to the universe - as they piece together their own organic subjectless autobiographies.
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