[para. 1]: "This special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies provides us with an opportunity to think through the transformation and the future direction of auto|biographical studies as a field of scholarly inquiry. It allows us to consider what the stakes are in the aademic study of auto|biographical writing, to reflect on the popularity of life writing resulting in the "memoir boom" about which life-writing scholars have written, and leads us to ask: what kind of intellectual (and political) engagement does the study of life narrative make possible?"