WHY WRITE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY AT THE AGE OF 23?

Memoirs, autobiography, life story, whatever you call it, usually contains human experiences, views, and crucial events that happened in the life of an individual. Most of the memoirs I read during my teenage years were written by people in their mid-life or late life. I mean people who have seen, heard, felt, and went through different phases of life over a long period of time.

Bookshop shelves these days are filled with autobiography of twenty year olds and people of such age brackets. Such books are authored by soccer stars, singers, and such. I even heard that Leona Lewis, the winner of X-Factor two years ago, did sign a lucrative deal to publish an autobiography. I wonder if a few years of fame qualifies Miss Lewis to tell us crucial lessons she has learned in her life.

What makes a person qualified to write an autobiography? Or better still, why do people write such kind of books? Fulfilment? Something worthwhile to share? Fame? Money? Each of these reasons is good and has the tendency to be revealed in the contents of the book. And contents do matter as insincere stories and irrelevant tales do not make a memoir as a couple of bricks do not make a house.

Yet it seems young people do love this kind of memoirs. While the story of how a young man or woman became a celebrity can encourage many to dream and work hard to achieve their goals, what is sometimes doesn’t do is tell about the pitfalls along such road. I have also found few of these celebrity memoirs full of unresolved bitterness against their fellow professionals and there are usually the so-called “untold secrets” which are mainly scandals and embarrassing events that happened to someone else while the writer was present.

Most young celebrity autobiography rarely reveal anything about the writers themselves but have a lot to reveal about their friends, former associates, and environments. Why would I want to read a memoir that doesn’t tell me about the person behind the book – their innermost thoughts, their deepest struggles, and the triumph that followed? I love to read about all the dimensions of a human – the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. I don’t want someone to tell me just “how they made it.”

Why would a young man or woman in their twenties want to write an autobiography? The answer is no youth really want to write the story of their life yet. That decision is mostly made by people who will sell such kind of book. Men who knows how profitable such book would be, whether its contents are relevant or not. I mean people who do not sincerely care for the well-being of the possessor of the memories being put on the pages of such memoir.