Odaatje and Danticat - Family and Self

The element of Ondaatje's work (or the strategy he uses) that most caught my attention when I began reading Running in the Family was his examination of his family rather than of himself. Much like Danticat, Odaatje uses his family to identify himself. He examines his family's history to explain the direction of his own life.
I find it interesting that both of these authors have done this, and I find it interesting that these are the two authors who have most engaged me and some others in the class. Maybe this is because they both use this strategy... Maybe we can better understand these authors for the same reason that these authors believe they can better understand themselves: because we understand their histories, there families' histories, their cultural histories.

I found Kazin fairly engaging, too, mostly because he so richly describes and explains his surroundings (and his relationships to those surroundings, like the synagogue, the block, the movie theater, his kitchen, etc.). I think this suggests that one of the most effective strategies in writing an autobiography is to write around yourself, rather than about yourself. Write about where you're from, both physically (as Kazin does) and - I don't have a real word for this - "familially" or historically (as Ondaatje and Danticat do); write about what led up to you; write about the things that were going on around you as you became you, as those things inevitably effected your development.

Perhaps this is a strategy I will employ in my own autobiography...