One of the most common types of nonfiction, and one that many people
enjoy reading, is stories about people's lives. These stories fall into three
general categories: autobiography, memoir, and biography. An
autobiography is the story of a person's life written by himself or herself.
Often it begins with the person's earliest recollections and ends in the
present. Autobiography writers may not be entirely objective in the way they
present themselves. However, they offer the reader a good look at the way they
are and what makes them that way. People as diverse as Benjamin Franklin and
Helen Keller have written autobiographies. Other writers, such as James Joyce,
have written thinly fictionalized accounts of their lives. These are not
autobiographies, but they are very close to it. Memoirs,
strictly speaking, are autobiographical accounts that focus as much on the
events of the times as on the life of the author. Memoir writers typically use
these events as backdrops for their lives. They describe them in detail and
discuss their importance. Recently, though, the term memoir seems to be becoming
interchangeable with autobiography. A memoir nowadays may or may not deal with
the outside world. Biographies are factual accounts of someone
else's life. In many senses, these may be the hardest of the three types to
write. Autobiography writers know the events they write about because they lived
them. But biography writers have to gather information from as many different
sources as possible. Then they have to decide which facts to include. Their goal
is to present a balanced picture of a person, not one that is overly positive or
too critical. A fair well-presented biography may take years to research and
write.
单选题
This passage is mostly about ______.
A. the characteristics of autobiographies, memoirs, and biographies
B. famous autobiographies
C. why biography can be difficult to write
D. differences between autobiographies and memoirs