Nightside Confessions

Autobiography is the ultimate example of the unreliable narrator in purported non-fiction. The only particularly compelling reason to read any autobiography is because you consider the author interesting enough to want to hear their life story in their own words (or those of their ghostwriter). That doesn’t necessarily mean that the most compelling autobiographies are those by people you consider admirable. There can be a certain fascination in reading the account a more dubious or ambiguous figure offers of their actions, particularly if you’ve read around the subject to get other sides of the story. You might not trust a single word they say, but knowing how someone wants to be seen by the world is informative in its own right. When a book is presented by its author as an “autohagiography” – ie, the autobiography of a saint – that goes double. I’ve covered some biographical material on Crowley before – namely, A Magick Life by Martin Booth, which naturally uses Crowley’s…