Reading an autobiography to me is like reading the writer’s diary. The writer tells his perspective about everything he sees mentally and physically. Because of that, the confusion whether the story is fact or fiction comes into being. Autobiography is formed by the memoirs of the writer. In writing autobiography, the writer unconsciously will write the most memorable events, whether if the events engrave good or bad memories for her. Like in Sage’sBad Blood, the story contains her memories about her past life, including her life with her grandparents and how he hates her grandfather by presenting him as “[t]he ‘old devil’, my grandfather, …” (2000: 7).
However, just like in the real life, the autobiography writer will also include other’s story in his story. In Sage’s autobiography, she is not just telling about herself, but also about his family, particularly her grandparents in the first part of the autobiography. It shows that there is connection between one person to another, and the connection constitutes the memory of the person. The person perceives this memory with many kinds of feeling. This perceived feeling can trigger person to create a narrative about the connection with other people. For instance, the writer’s feeling about her grandfather or the grandmother’s feeling about the grandfather.
Furthermore, one of the most interesting parts is when she reads her grandfather’s diary. Here the reader will also get into the narrative story of Sage’s grandfather via the perspective of Sage. Sage tells her hatred of her grandfather’s relationship with the Nurses so that she claims her as a womanizer.
So I nearly censored January to June 1933 in the interests of Grandpa’s glamour as a Gothic personage. But in truth this is what we should be exposed to – the awful knowledge that when they’re not breaking the commandments, the anti-heroes are mending their tobacco pipes and listening to the wireless. (47)
Here we can see that the information she received from her grandfather’s diary is not exposed entirely, but censored. That means, the written information in this autobiography comes from the desire of the writer which information she wants to display in this narrative.
Moreover, the addition of other person’s story in this autobiography makes the narrative more dynamic. Firstly, the title of the first chapter can describe how she hates her grandfather by using a metaphor (The Old Devil, of course, refers to her grandfather). But then after she writes her expression of her grandparents, she describes descriptively about the setting of the story, for example, the history of the village, the condition of the village, the grandfather’s church, the congregation, etc. After that, the grandmother’s perspective about the circumstance, particularly about her husband, is told. Again, the narrative is maintained not only by the writer’s story, but also by the people around her.
Works Cited
Sage, L. (2000). Bad Blood. London: Fourth Estate.