PREFACE
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The thing about writing an autobiography is that you don’t really know who your audience is. Unless you’re Benjamin Franklin or a cancer patient or a dog that can speak, that is. Or if you’re extremely famous because you hold the secrets to having perfect skin at the fruitful age of forty. That’s what I’m feeling as I write this anyway. My life is pretty mundane.

Then as for the reason I started this, I don’t have a definite answer. I just thought I should record what I remember when I remember it best. Romantic teenage tendencies, I guess – maybe even middle school, elementary school tendencies. Whatever you call it, here's my main problem: I know what I want to write about but I’m not sure who I’m writing to. It’s really the weirdest thing if you think about it, because look: If I’m writing this for me, but I’m writing in a tone that speaks to an audience, who am I writing to, really? That’s the biggest question about writing, essentially. They say you should write for yourself but really, a writer is not a writer without a reader. So what's a writer supposed to do? What an annoying paradox.

What I plan to do as I write the following snippets of my life, however, is to pretend. I am going to pretend that I have an audience and I am going to pretend that I am a writer with a reader. In reality, I’ll just be writing so that I can understand why I am who I am right now. It’s all in the name of self-reflection. My audience is me.

At any rate, I’m reading a novel in my English class right now called The Things They Carried (great title by the way) by Tim O’Brien and I have three things to say about it:

1. Is his name pronounced “Brien” as in "Brian" or “Brien” as it “Bree-en”? I’m too lazy to Google it.

2. He’s an amazing author and he loves metaphors. I love metaphors.

3. Here’s a quote about writing and stories that I drew a huge, inky star next to because I loved it:

“… the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes, remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”

And it’s true.

Therefore, I will write.

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