In writing a life, the life narrator and the biographer engage different kinds of evidence. Most biographers incorporate multiple forms of evidence, including historical documents, interviews, and family archives, which they evaluate for validity. Relatively few biographers use their personal memories of their subject as reliable evidence, unless they had a personal relationship to the subject of the biography (as a relative, child, friend, or colleague). For life narrators, by contrast, personal memories are the primary archival source. They may have recourse to other kinds of sources ― letters, journals, photographs, conversations ― and to their knowledge of a historical moment. But the usefulness of such evidence for their stories lies in the ways in which they employ that evidence to support, supplement, or offer commentary on their personalized acts of remembering. In autobiographical narratives, imaginative acts of remembering always overlap with such rhetorical acts as assertion, justification, judgment, conviction, and questioning.
* archive: 기록 ** recourse: 의지 *** rhetorical: 수사적인