How do people writing biographies recall their lives in such detail. I barely remember my childhood just bits and pieces here and there. But nothing close to writing a book.
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Some of it is embellished, I’m sure, with the assistance of a ghost writer or their own imagination- nobody wants to read “I remember our next door neighbor, Mr. Somethingorother,” so they call him Mr. Smith.
Some of it is documented and can be referenced, especially if someone’s life has been notable enough to justify writing an autobiography. This could be public record or personal papers, photos, and journals.
But also, not everyone can “barely remember” their childhood. I have quite a few vivid childhood memories, and I would say I could give a *reasonably* accurate broad-strokes narrative of major events as well as daily routines in my life back to age three (accounting for the fact that of course what I understood about things going on around as a three year old was limited compared to what I know as an adult). I probably wouldn’t get everything right, but I could remember enough to use as a starting point for fact-checking to confirm dates/locations/names. I have some snapshot memories from earlier than three, but since that was the age at which I first moved houses, it’s harder for me to place them precisely in time.
I know this isn’t universal- my husband has said that he remembers hardly anything before school age. We’ve had some debates over whether our young children will “remember any of this” when it comes to daily life, because I (based on my experience) think they will, and he (based on his experience) thinks they won’t. I guess we’ll see.
I would venture that most people are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between “remember everything” and “remember nothing” and that people who decide to write an autobiography in the first place are more likely to be on the “remembering things” end of the spectrum.
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