It's Like Pulling Teeth

In his essay, "Writing Personal Essays: On the Necessity of Turning Oneself Into a Character," Philip Lopate warns that when writing in the first person we should "resist coming across at first as absolutely average." We have to approach autobiography, in other words, like any other writing task, and instead of describing the all-too-familiar or documenting the mundane, we should instead be mindful of the unusual, the odd, and the offbeat.

In his 1924 autobiography Everywhere, Arnold Henry Savage-Landor Landor, the famed traveler and painter and grandson of Walter Savage-Landor, describes the following moment from his childhood.

There was in our garden a big tree, a Mespilus Japonica. The lowest branch was too high for me to reach. The tree was laden with fruit. I went to the stable, took a long feather strap and threw it astride the lowest branch, then held one end firmly between my teeth while I jumped up, pulling at the same time with my hands the other end of the strap, thinking I could thus lift myself up. Result -- my eight front teeth were torn from my gums. With a bleeding mouth I picked up my incisors which lay scattered on the ground, and ran to show them to my horrified mother. You're lucky you're not seven yet," she said. I was then four and a half years of age.