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Telling Tales about People One of the most common types of nonfiction, and one that many people enjoy reading, is stories about peoples lives. These stories fall into three general categories: autobiography, memoir, and biography. An autobiography is the story of a persons life written by himself or herself. Often it begins with the persons 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 Benjarmin Franklin and Helen Keller have written autobiographies. 1Other 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. 2Memoir 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 interchangeab1e with autobiography. A memoir nowadays may or may not deal with the outside world. Biographies are factual accounts of someone elses 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. | 
