John Updike has identified autobiographical writing as a way of coping with the otherwise 'unbearable' knowledge 'that we age and leave behind this litter of dead, unrecoverable selves' (226). In this sense, the selves we have been may seem to us as discrete and separate as the other persons with whom we live our relational lives. This experiential truth points to the fact that our sense of continuous identity is a fiction, the primary fiction of all self-narration.

• autobiography
• causa-sui
• aging
• self
• many i"s
• relational identity
• identity
• continuous identity
• narrative
• narratization
• other
• truth
• knowledge
• writing