That's a really interesting thought. I'm fairly positive that the picture left by the things I've written wouldn't really reflect the real me. Like you said, it would only be parts of a whole and they might put the pieces together wrong.

Though I can't help but think that a biographer might end up trying to make sense of your words by also interviewing those that knew and incorporating those interpretations with your writings. It feels kind of like they'd be a detective, solving the mystery of who you were.

Or maybe I've been watching too many crime dramas and mysteries lately.

No, I think you're right. Krakauer interviewed family, friends, and chance-met-strangers who knew Chris McCandless, and even if all those people were long gone by the time a biographer decided to examine a life, they would probably have left their own written remnants. And I'd think that somewhere in those, there might be bits of opinion. I suppose that's what being a historian is like: sifting through primary source materials until you begin to piece together the shape and color of a time or a person.

This is a really interesting thought given my overall area of artistic interest. I write, but primarily about myself and it's always a point to think about how I am interpreted, but the unexpirgated diaries. Damn. Those are not for public consumption. Karen once said a very true thing, "People will believe anything you tell them about yourself." I have found her right for good or ill. On a side note there is a ST: Voyager episode that deals with this theme as Janeway researches an ancestor she has heard stories about only to be confronted with some realities about them.

In what way do you think a biography would be acurate or inacurrate?

I'm not sure how a biography would be accurate or inaccurate, actually. As much as I try to think of my words outside myself, I have too much knowledge of those words' contexts to properly interpret them as a stranger. I just know that there are things I've written---usually in my own unexpurgated diaries---that are so emotional, so tied to one moment that when I read them now I can only faintly see my current self in them. And I wonder if a stranger, reading those entries, would find it difficult to reconcile them with all the others that I feel are more consistently "me." And how would they decide which entries are more representative of my true self?

Then add in all the papers I've written---all carry the weight of my word choice, my writing style, but not all were wrought with the fullest effort or even the most honest opinions. And there are letters that spell the deepest of myself, certainly, but what about all the ones where I was deliberately light-hearted and silly? How would those be interpreted? Even my fiction, where my philosophies and cherished concepts are arguably the most obvious, can be read and understood through the lens of its reader rather than its author. Someone once told me, for instance, that I must be just like the heroine in the short story I published. There are aspects of her personality I share, true, but she's a much, much gentler heroine than I would be, and anyone acting toward me as others acted toward her would receive a vastly different response.

What a morass of words to wade through. People may believe anything you tell them about yourself, but I think they frame those statements within your actions, expressions, tones of voice, patterns of behavior. And it's those things as well as your own words that allow them to know you...or not know you, as the case may be.