Am I doomed to once a month posting?

Guess so, because I got three biographies from the library and had to renew them to avoid fines, although two will go back tomorrow:  Backing Into Forward by Jules Feiffer and Chinaberry Sidewalks by Rodney Crowell.  The third, I will eventually get to.

I expect the laugh continuously with the Feiffer, not.  As I planned out what to write about it, I thought how appropriate he was to use car gears to describe his life.  However, the book is in idle.

Once again, as with too many of the biographies I have selected recently, I am planted in another NYC Jewish neighborhood in the 40s and 50s.  I get it, I get it.  (And add to that, Bernie Sanders.)  I loved Feiffer's cartoons in Playboy.  (When I mentioned him to my husband, he said, who .... guess guys really only looked at the boobs.)  I loved Feiffer even more as the illustrator of The Phantom Toolbooth.  But the book, meh.

Contrast that with Chinaberry Sidewalks.  No idea who Rodney Crowell was/is and he had me both laughing out loud and crying.  I picked it up only because the flap said it was about growing up in Houston.  It is a bit like the best parts of The Boy Kings of Texas, and like that book, has a few low points, especially his teenage years and years of figuring out girls and sex, and then Crowell like the boy kings, gets into 60s drug culture.

So I ponder ... what is an  autobiography?  How much of an un-analyzed diary?  Shouldn't the author comment on his experience with some hindsight and growth?  How much is too much information or does the reader have to be introduced to the sins of the author, when no lessons or growth are recorded?  Is a life well-lived only the one that gives that person a chance to write about it?

All things considered, I still prefer autobiographies to biographies.  While the latter are more interpretative and assessing, they lack the "in my brain this is what I thought we were all doing," that a memoir provides.  I want to change the genre.  I want to be a biographer of my life, trying to reassess what I did then by what I know now.