— a tell all autobiography tells you the inside story of a person. A tell nothing biography does not even, probably, know of or admit to the existence of a story.
— a tell nothing autobiography contains none of the information that a biographer of the same person would include, though it may allude to such information.
— in fact, almost by definition, a tell nothing contains information an actual biography, or autobiography, would be compelled to omit.
— it is autobiography as told exclusively from the present; it doesn’t feel it can look forward or back. It can’t say, over time, what is meaningful.
— Although it strives to be strictly factual, it is a work of fiction rather than non, which has to do with the nature of the facts it discloses.
— Namely, that they’re exceedingly mundane, minute, irrelevant, largely impersonal facts; and the reason for reporting such details, nevertheless, is that our lives are mainly composed of such meaningless moments as these. (The non mundane, non minute and relevant is a sort of matter that is dense and satisfying but rare in our lives).
— The relationship of a modern author to his literary avatar is an interesting question. The Walt Whitman of Leaves of Grass is not Walt Whitman the author, and Proust is not The Narrator, but perhaps like the DF Wallace of The Pale King, the author of the tell nothing is absolutely himself. (Meanwhile, unlike the author of a tell all autobiography, the author of the tell nothing knows he’s not Liza Minelli, knows there’s no inherent interest in his life. In fact he styles himself an Every Man or aspires to that status.)
— It is as if a composer, instead of setting down the music he heard in his head, went around recording the sounds of ordinary life. That doesn’t make it sound very desirable, at least not if the composer had any good ideas, but it does illustrate that this is a different sort of pursuit: primarily interested in seeking out reality, not in seeking out beauty, though ostensibly these intersect.
— It is a novel without invention, it is a diary without personal significance …
— A writer, a real writer, a novelist, would say “it’s not about me, the writer, but about the writing, my creation. No one cares about me, the writer, and I don’t care for them to know.” The tell nothing shares this view but is also tired of protagonists who are clear proxies for their authors and their circle. “Let us admit, even if it’s untrue, that our books are about us, let’s bleed the novel form into the essay form,” says the tell nothing.
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