All are written by a person about themselves, why do we need 3 different words?
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An autobiography is a factual telling of life events, written by the person it is about. A diary is just a personal journal and not typically meant for public consumption. A memoir is a set of personal anecdotes and often only covers a specific time period.
A diary is a collection of regular writings (usually private, and kept daily) that a person produces to record experiences or thoughts that might otherwise be forgotten with the passage of time.
A mémoire is a person’s reflection on their experiences, usually in a more temporally cohesive expository form. A mémoire may be written for publishing or for private use. But the key is that it is usually a reflection on experiences rather than a simple record of them.
An autobiography is a account of a person’s life from their perspective, usually for the purpose of publishing as a book.
Think of it this way: a person’s diary is a record of what happened, a mémoire is reflections on those happenings, and an autobiography is a mémoire edited for publishing as a book.
A diary is an account of life kept at the time, as it’s happening
An autobiography is supposed to be a comprehensive account of one’s whole life to date, a biography of oneself
A memoir is more fluid and can be an account of a specific period of one’s life, a specific theme in one’s life, it’s just a retrospective look back at your life in some way
In reality though autobiography and memoir are often used interchangeably.
A diary is just a book that someone writes for themselves and usually not something written with the intent of publication (even if it does get published later).
A memoir is a subcategory of autobiography. An autobiography is the story of their life, a memoir is when it only covers specific time periods or certain events. For example a book that only covers childhood and makes no mention of their adult years would probably be considered a memoir.
They’re used fairly interchangeable because defining an exact boundary for when it covers too much to be considered a memoir isn’t really useful to anyone.
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