If You Must Write Your Autobiography

If you must write your autobiography, let it be discovered by “accident” after you die and let it be published only reluctantly, semi-scandalously, with much hemming and hawing. Let it be as if you were speaking, ventriloquist-like, from beyond the grave… like an Emily Dickinson poem in which the speaker—eerily and uncannily—refers to her own life in the past tense.