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Sat 05 May 2007How the Irish autobiography went from 'we' to 'I'As RTÉ and Gill & Macmillan launch a €10,000 writing competition for true life stories, Liam Harte asks why critical literature on Irish autobiography remains so slight despite the genre's prevalenceIf, in these days of voluminous literary criticism, Irish literature can be said to have a Cinderella genre, then surely it is autobiography. When weighed against the welter of scholarly work on Irish poetry, drama and fiction, the critical literature on autobiography seems remarkably slight, in quantity if not quality. This critical neglect seems all the more curious when one considers the preponderance of life-writing in contemporary Irish culture, spectacularly spearheaded by Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes (1996). By the time its sequel, 'Tis, appeared in 1999, booksellers' shelves were sagging under the weight of copycat texts, proof that the autobiographical gesture was becoming endemic in Celtic Tiger Ireland. The commensurate success of Nuala O'Faolain's Are You Somebody? (1996) - described by the author herself as "an emotional episode" in Irish public life - suggested that, in an era of secular individualism, stories that were once told only to partner or priest were now more likely to be committed to the page. In a culture of diminished faith and discredited clergy, the cathartic appeal of the confessional memoir would appear to have eclipsed that of the confessional box. If anything, that appeal looks set to intensify with the launching this week of a non-fiction writing competition on RTÉ Radio 1's The Tubridy Show, in partnership with Gill & Macmillan. They're seeking true personal stories of all kinds for which the prize is a €10,000 publishing contract.