Jonathan Taylor writes:
At the NYRBlog, Janet Malcolm with four packed paragraphs of “Thoughts on Autobiography from an Abandoned Autobiography“:

When one’s work has been all but done—as mine has been for over a quarter of a century—by one brilliant self-inventive collaborator after another, it isn’t easy to suddenly find oneself alone in the room…

The “I” of journalism is a kind of ultra-reliable narrator and impossibly rational and disinterested person, whose relationship to the subject more often than not resembles the relationship of a judge pronouncing sentence on a guilty defendent. This “I” is unsuited to autobiography. Autobiography is an exercise in self-forgiveness. The observing “I” of autobiography tells the story of the observed “I” not as a journalist tells the story of his subject, but as a mother might.