In early 1999 I took a course called "Readings in Western Literature: Autobiography" as part of my Humanities graduate programme. A term paper was required and I knew from the start that I wasn't going to write an autobiography. So here it is.

Each page in this tangle is an autobiographical fragment that connects out to two others through hyperlinks, bridging times and themes by fragile mental associations. The stream of consciousness that results differs from non-chronological autobiographies like Barthes' [1] and Woolf's [2] by giving you, the reader, some role in choosing the path through the material. As in other hypertext literature, there is no guarantee that every node (item) will be visited during reading, but I have taken some steps in design to nudge you through trajectories that will be wide ranging (See how).

For the course, I provided my readers with a printed version of the web pages, plus a commentary, though I urged them to walk the web online. I think they settled for reading my ordering of the material as printed, which, perhaps, undermines the hypertextuality of it all. I've used excerpts from the commentary to answer the questions "How?" and "Really?" in the banner bar.

[1] Roland Barthes, "Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes", tr Richard Howard, University of California Press, 1977.

[2] Virginia Woolf, "Moments of Being", ed Jeanne Schulkind, Hog arth Press, 2^nd. Ed. 1985.