Life writing

In my OU creative writing course, I am moving on to a section on 'life writing'.  It's the one area I haven't attempted before - unless my sporadic attempts at keeping a diary (at secondary school) are counted.

In fact, I didn't even know what life writing was.  On further investigation, it appears to be what is better known as biography and autobiography, but also includes travel writing, diaries and some personal essays.

My wife enjoys reading biographies of writers and I have generally left that to be 'her thing'.  My tutor asked me to think over the biographies I have read - embarrassingly few!  I can probably count on the fingers of one hand, and even then I am being fairly liberal about what is counted as an autobiography - 'Boy' by Roald Dahl?  'Trying to save Piggy Sneed' by John Irving?  Some essays on writing by Gunter Grass?  David Copperfield?

At least with poetry I could make up for lost time by reading a lot of poems in a short time.  With this section, I'm going to have to get speed-reading.