Murray Summary

An autobiography is a non-fiction written account of the author's life. Murray, however, argues that everything a writer writes, is autobiographical. That is not to say that the paper itself is an autobiography but it has its nature. Murray argues that the writer is selective with his or her writing. Which parts are in details, which parts are removed; all of those are selections that we make based on our individuality. Writers put pieces of themselves into their writing, and in response, what we write becomes part of ourselves. He states that we start believing what we write. An example he gives is that in one of his poems, he wrote about a boy named Alex. At first, people believed that Alex was his brother because he wrote it that way, but the author was a single child. He later explained that because he wrote it, he now believed it. "We become what we write" (62). Murray disagreed with today's academic curriculum. He does not think that students should write a diversity of genres, but rather, a few set of genres with which students are obsessed. At the end, Murray comments about how his autobiography can be dangerous. The poems he write can subconsciously cause people to write poems of their own. These are poems that are created within their minds; and thus, they become what they read.