For my first article, I’m going to talk about Winter Journal, a book written by Paul Auster. He was an actor, a filmmaker but mostly an author.
Winter Journal was released in 2012 and was his last book. It is not really a novel, neither an autobiography nor a brief. Thirty years after his first book, Auster depicts fragments of his life since he was six.

The author himself said that his book was like a poem, written at the 2nd person. It is as if he were talking to someone (which could be anyone). Given that he was himself a director, he scrolls his life as a scenario, with long sentences which sometimes have not a real sense of the rest of it.
He talks about the passing of time and his sensory data. He tells us about feelings that were lost and found, life’s pleasures and accidents, women reciting Baudelaire’s poems from New York to Paris. Moreover, the book ends the same way it starts.
To sum up, although the author doesn’t consider the book as an autobiography, there is all his life in it and also all his feeling about every important moment of his life such as what he likes eating, place where he lived, his dreams…

“We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.”