在 Facebook 上连载自传：一位科学史家如何把私人记忆变成公共对话

When I was about 15, alone in the flat one afternoon, I sneaked into my mother’s writing desk and found a small pocket calendar from 1946 pushed to the back of a drawer. I had grown up with my mother and her parents, not knowing who my biological father was, or how I had come about; the question was simply never asked. I turned, with a kind of dread, to the entries from nine months before I was born. In mid-March there was an ordinary note – ‘Party at the Academic Association’; she was training as a laboratory technician in Lund and liked the students’ company – and on the following day, in her hand, five words: ‘God, what have I done!’ I still remember the shock of standing there with the diary, half-guilty for trespassing on her private papers, and saying aloud, over and over: ‘That’s me – that’s me. What have you done? I’m a mistake.’

For half a century, the scene stayed as it was: fixed, private, finished. Then, about a decade ago, I posted it – to several hundred old acquaintances and strangers – on Facebook. I was in doubt; I felt faint embarrassment at making it public, but this was itself part of what I wanted to examine. Why was it shameful? What did the shame tell me about myself? And would saying it out loud, to strangers, do anything to drain the memory of its sting? The answers came from my readers, and one of them showed me something I could not have seen on my own.

Betty, a friend from the years we were postdocs together at Stanford, had heard me tell the story in person long ago, and she said the written version was missing something: my voice, the intonation and the look on my face. What look, I asked – had I played it for sympathy, had I ironised it? ‘Absolutely flat,’ she wrote. ‘No affect. A Max von Sydow deadpan. But yes, you ironised.’ I had not known that about myself: that I’d delivered the central wound of my origins with no expression at all and turned it into a dry joke.

That discovery, prompted by a reader’s response, was one of the first signs that writing one’s life in public could change how memory and narrative take shape. Writing an autobiography or memoir was traditionally a solitary undertaking. Authors worked through papers, memories and past events largely on their own, occasionally consulting family, friends or colleagues. Only after years of private work would the manuscript reach the public. Readers encountered the finished account, with little sense of the revisions, doubts and shifts in understanding that had shaped it.

Social media has fundamentally disrupted these conditions. By publishing sequential episodes of my life every few days, however, I have turned my autobiographical drafts into a continuing dialogue with my readers. Their real-time responses have made me reconsider how I understand my professional achievements, my personal relationships and myself. The question that drives it is not what happens when you put a memoir on Facebook, but a quieter one: what happens to self-image when it is formed in public?

As a professional historian of science, I have always been fascinated by biographies, autobiographies and memoirs – viewing them not merely as raw material for writing history, or even microhistories, but as distinct accounts of the past in their own right. Yet now, writing my life story piece by piece in public, I’ve begun to question whether a life can ever be framed, genuinely, as a coherent narrative – and whether that uncertainty might be a good thing.

I chose to focus on the personal context, developing an approach I termed existential scientific biography

I first tried my hand at full-scale life-writing in 1986, shortly after I finished my first book, on the history of Swedish ecology. Almost accidentally, I met with Niels Kaj Jerne, the Danish immunologist who had been awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine just two years earlier. ‘I have saved some papers,’ he casually remarked as we sat talking over a glass of wine in the kitchen of his large villa in southern France. We went up to the spacious attic room, where he parted the shutters and gestured towards the ancient Roman aqueduct, the Pont du Gard. Yet, I had no interest in antiquity; my attention was entirely arrested by the hundreds of grocery bags from the local supermarché lined up across the stone floor. They were stuffed to the brim with intimate letters, private diaries, raw laboratory protocols, rough article drafts, and decades of correspondence with colleagues around the world. He had kept virtually every scrap of paper that had passed through his hands from his youth onwards.

I can still vividly recall the thrill of exploring this unique archive. That afternoon set in motion a seven-year cooperation. At the outset, we discussed the possibility of weaving biography and autobiography together; we toyed with the idea of a book in a parallel format, with my biographical text on the left-hand pages and his personal recollections on the right – auto/biography as interlocution.

The vision of a side-by-side account soon faded, however, because Jerne – who was then in his mid-70s – lacked the stamina to draft his own memoir. Instead, through hundreds of hours of conversation, I managed to elicit a wealth of memory fragments that continuously enriched, and occasionally disrupted, my developing account of him.

Jerne’s unusual candour about his personal and intimate life led me, early on, to view his private and scientific realms as an integrated whole. Most of my colleagues in the history of science viewed biography as an ancilla historiae – a handmaid to history – and thus focused on the social and cultural context of researchers and their work. In contrast, I chose to focus on the personal context, developing an approach I termed existential scientific biography. As a lifelong admirer of Søren Kierkegaard, Jerne enthusiastically embraced this framework.

Jerne died in 1994. By the time my book about him, Science as Autobiography, appeared in 2003, I had been appointed professor of the history of medicine at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. There, I hoped to focus on medical biography and autobiography. But I quickly became absorbed in transforming the university’s medical history museum into Medical Museion. My life-writing went on standby for several years.

It was only upon retiring 10 years ago that I found myself free to resume my fascination with life-writing, now with the roles reversed: after decades spent writing the lives of others, I would become my own subject. The decision was sparked one afternoon while I was clearing out my office at the museum. I suddenly realised how much material I had accumulated without having given it a second thought while I lived my life ‘forwards’, as Kierkegaard once put it.

My almost 50-year-long academic paper trail was a cornucopia of manuscripts, bundles of correspondence, lecture notes, meeting minutes and calendars. These were not in shopping bags on a stone floor, but in magazine files and stacks on office shelves. Yet the emotional impulse was the same as in Jerne’s attic room in Languedoc 30 years earlier, and I was seized by an irresistible urge to reconstruct my own life. It was high time to begin understanding life ‘backwards’. I was about to turn 70 and I realised – much like Socrates – that the unexamined life is not worth living. What had I achieved? How had I used my talents, and what mistakes had I made? Could I go to my grave without answering such questions?

Who, besides myself, could be interested in the answers? Unlike Jerne, I was not a well-known figure – but that was, paradoxically, a virtue. For me, the examined life mattered as a souci de soi, an act of self-care. I thought of the writing exercise as a present-day, healthy ageing counterpart to the late-medieval and early modern ars moriendi – the art of dying well.

I spent three years reading and taking notes, year by year, page by page

And for others, I thought, my autobiography might be of interest as an experiment and an example: I wanted my readers to focus on questions of genre without being distracted by the historical (in)significance of the subject.

I packed the professional papers into removal boxes and set up an archive room in the basement at home, adding my private papers – school essays, diaries, personal letters and photographs – and also downloaded tens of thousands of work-related files and emails from the university server. I then spent three years reading and taking notes, year by year, page by page. Much was factual and emotionally neutral. Some old articles stirred a sense of pride; others were downright embarrassing. Angry letters from former intimate partners were particularly painful to revisit.

The emotional rollercoaster had its counterpart in the labour of memory. I would lie on the bed with the curtains drawn and earplugs in, to stifle sensory impressions, transporting myself in imagination to the many places I had lived, visited and worked, and the people I had met, trying to capture my immediate feelings of pleasure, joy, longing, unease, sorrow or fear as I recalled them. These deliberately summoned memories were then supplemented by the thousands of fragments that surfaced as I worked my way through the archive.

Archival documents and memories are the obvious source materials for anyone writing their autobiography – and gathering them had so far been exactly the solitary labour the genre is known for: the lone author behind drawn curtains, exhuming papers and interrogating memory. But few authors go further and seek out the people they have encountered throughout their lives. As an experienced oral historian – both for the history of ecology and, later, for the Jerne biography – I had already spent hundreds of hours interviewing others about their lives. So it was a natural step to turn the same method on myself, and supplement the archival records and my own memories by contacting people from my past – childhood and adolescent friends, schoolmates, teachers, former colleagues, and even former girlfriends – in order to flesh out and contrast my self-image with their perspectives. Some declined; others had little more than banalities to offer (‘you were tall and thin’), but many were surprisingly candid. Over the years, I have spoken with several hundred acquaintances and colleagues, and have renewed a couple of lost connections – though not romantic ones. These conversations were the first breach in the traditional solitude of the genre.

It was almost inevitable that my autobiography would be existential. I wanted to understand how my years as an academic researcher and teacher were interwoven with my life as a whole: upbringing and education, personality and aesthetic preferences, political and moral commitments, social and personal relationships. Inspired by the French philosopher Pierre Hadot, I conceived of my intellectual work as ‘a form of life’; I therefore regarded my archives, memories and conversations with friends, colleagues and acquaintances as ‘spiritual exercises’ that could help me towards greater self-awareness. In the words of Michel Foucault: as a ‘technology of the self’.

In addition to the existential approach, there was yet another aspect of life-writing that I brought with me from my experiences with Jerne, namely the cooperative construction of a life story. And what makes that construction possible, at scale and with readers, is the medium.

What is new in my project is the move onto social media. For me, this was no great leap: a decade before I began the memoir, I had begun blogging, and later Tweeting, extensively about the museum’s transformation. So, when I embarked on my autobiography, writing it on social media felt entirely natural.

I chose Facebook – it lends itself to longer texts, and it was where many of my old friends and colleagues were already. I posted several times a week: striking memories, interesting documents I had read, engaging conversations with old schoolmates, and, not least, spontaneous reflections on genre. I wrote in Swedish, my mother tongue, in my adopted Danish, and in English, as the mood took me. The posts formed a florilegium: a gathering of flowers in the original sense of the word. Gradually, I accumulated friends and followers, who began responding to the life I was putting before them. A dialogue was quietly getting under way.

After a few years of unstructured writing, I began to proceed systematically, still on Facebook, of course, but now in a feuilleton format – a serial form published in instalments. One might suppose that my inspiration was the serialised novel of the 19th century, but my actual model was not Dickens, Dostoevsky or Dumas; it was the dramaturgy of the television series: the division into seasons, the thematically coherent episodes, the tension between what is resolved and what is left open – and the cliffhanger.

I have provisionally divided the feuilleton into 16 seasons, from childhood to a final season about my autobiographical work and my second set of children. I do not write and publish them strictly chronologically, but in the order that satisfies my curiosity and nostalgic cravings. (Though once I have started a season, I see it through chronologically in its entirety before moving on to the next.)

I have no master plan telling me in advance which parts of my life will matter

An episode is a thematically coherent Facebook post of 300-500 words that takes a specific situation or experience as its point of departure. Working from a raw file of letters, diary entries and present-day reflections, I winnow the material and try to render what happened clearly enough for some meaning to emerge. Each episode must be able to stand alone, intelligible and engaging even for those who only occasionally follow my Facebook feed.

How many episodes a season holds emerges only in the writing, as readers’ comments spur new insights and new episodes. And above all, I have no master plan telling me in advance which parts of my life will matter.

An average episode takes roughly a day to formulate. I begin with a private draft written from my own authorial perspective, then copy-and-paste it to the Facebook text box and continue working, now with the reader’s gaze in mind. It is often only when writing the Facebook version that my inner reader discovers weaknesses that my inner author had overlooked – much as a writer catches in the proofs what they missed in the manuscript. Sometimes, the point of an episode only becomes clear just before I press ‘send’ at lunchtime and wait for the responses that come in throughout the afternoon and evening.

Working at this pace, I can publish three or four episodes a week; across the whole project, I have posted almost 2,000 times, serving up autobiography as soap opera.

The crucial difference between writing one’s autobiography in traditional book form and writing it as a feuilleton on social media is the possibility of entering into a dialogue with readers from the earliest stages. The profile currently has more than 1,000 followers from Sweden, Denmark, the UK and the US, and each post usually draws at least a handful of comments; occasionally as many as 200. Most responses come from a core group of around 100 regular participants; they come from every walk of life, and some of the sharpest remarks come from readers with no scholarly training at all. In recent years, however, this engagement has diminished, partly reflecting a general trend on social media, but perhaps also a waning interest in the project itself (another similarity with TV series).

The comments vary widely. Some followers recount similar experiences; others correct factual details or suggest literature for contextualising the episode; still others offer alternative interpretations. The best exchanges have the intensity and quality of a good seminar with a small group of students or colleagues. Like in-person seminars, I respond to every comment, often revising language that might give rise to misunderstanding.

No single exchange has been revolutionary; what matters is the accumulation – hundreds of small corrections and re-readings, settling slowly into a different sense of who I have been. I do not know what the next episode will look like, how the season will end, or what shape the whole will take.

The deepest corrections altered the account of the person I was. In the season about my years as a PhD student, I describe an event relating to a former partner, Lone. We had lived together in Copenhagen in the mid-1970s, but the relationship was troubled, as I remember it, because of her mood swings, which I attributed to her diabetes. I left her for someone else and then stopped thinking about her almost entirely. Years afterward, she suddenly wrote to me, saying she had been evicted from her flat and asked for help. I did not answer. On my 40th birthday, she sent me an envelope lined with red silk paper, empty inside. I did not answer that either. It was only when I began the memoir decades later that I searched for her in the Danish public registry and discovered she had died in her early 40s, alone as far as I could tell. I then remembered I had once promised her I would be there when she died and plant daisies on her grave, and felt guilty about not having fulfilled my pledge.

What the post did not give me, the readers did in their comments. An old neighbour, Eva, who had known Lone, supplied a fuller portrait than I had been able to manage on my own; I had been writing, I admitted to her in the comments, ‘under the influence of my memory of the bad aspects of the relationship’. Another reader, Barbro, caught me in a single line: people would describe her own personality much as I had described Lone’s, she wrote – and she had never had diabetes. I had inadvertently conflated Lone’s difficult personality with her chronic illness in a way that exonerated my decision to leave her. A third reader, Kristina, asked what I thought the empty envelope had meant. I tried to deflect: I had been blank then and was blank now. She refused the deflection – she had not asked what I thought back then, she had asked what I think now. When I still had no answer, she offered one: a beautiful container with nothing inside, a friendship promised for a lifetime that turned out to be air. The process was forcing the container open, allowing a small, late act of atonement when another reader, Carolina, suggested I plant the daisies anywhere beautiful, since I had no grave to find. But I have still not planted them.

I had to defend – or reconsider – my gaze in real time, under the scrutiny of people I respect

Readers are no gentler with my professional life than with my private one. Now and then, they puncture the version of myself I have just offered. In one post, I recounted an episode from the final year of my PhD studies, when I attended the Swedish annual meeting for historians of science. The morning’s keynote, by the most powerful professor in the field just back from a sabbatical at Berkeley, had struck me as a long and self-satisfied catalogue of the distinguished colleagues he had met and the dinners he had attended. My irritation grew with the square of the elapsed minutes. When the floor opened, I put up my hand and asked, with deliberate weight on the adjective and no softening preamble, whether he had got any intellectual benefit from his trip as well. There was a silence, then scattered tittering. The chairman immediately declared coffee break, and I felt like a king for a few minutes amid the other doctoral students’ admiration (‘How did you dare?’), until the keynote speaker’s own student looked at me with a dry smile and said: ‘There you’ve evidently destroyed your career in Swedish history of science.’ He was right; I took my future ambitions to Denmark.

I posted this as a cautionary anecdote, but some of my readers declined to let it stay one. One refused the heroic frame: I was not brave, Mats said, but rather ‘naive and insensitive’; I could have asked the same legitimate question in a way that sought an answer rather than an audience. I conceded: ‘Yes, it was provocative and foolhardy.’ An American colleague, Richard, turned the story over and read its underside – call it instead ‘How I began my career in Denmark’ – and I had to agree that leaving the Swedish history-of-science milieu was my intellectual salvation. My Danish colleague Jes moved the lens onto vanity itself: gracious answers existed that would have honoured the question without diminishing the questioner, but they require the one quality rarest in academic life, ‘the absence of a dominating vanity’ – and then he caught his own pretension in the act of saying so.

Between them, the three readers dislodged the small monument I had built to my own courage and showed me the vanity inside it. The thread also made me admit that this was not a single youthful lapse but a pattern: I had done the same to a leading European scholar a few years later.

Sometimes, the dialogue puts the act of telling itself on trial. I once posted a memory from a conference in the 1980s, dominated in my recollection by a young female doctoral student wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt that prominently accentuated her breasts – an image that, at the time, had prompted hushed, stereotypical jokes among the male attendees about ‘Mickey’s ears’. I described it as a moment in which she deliberately played on her gender.

The reaction from my Facebook readers was swift and polarised. A younger colleague attacked the post as sordid, accusing me of reproducing today the same objectifying male gaze I claimed merely to be reporting from the past. Another woman read the student’s choice as a breaching experiment – a conscious subversion of the grey academic dress code. A third defended my right to report the past as I remembered it, noting the ‘Lutheran asceticism’ often demanded of female academics, and offered her own counter-anecdote about a male presenter whose thin linen trousers had distracted an entire audience.

The dialogue did not correct my memory, but it forced me into an uncomfortable ethical confrontation with my own role as narrator. Was I documenting the past, or was I still looking through that same 1980s lens? The ethical practice lies in exactly this friction: the feuilleton format made it impossible to hide behind polished, retrospective wisdom. I had to defend – or reconsider – my gaze in real time, under the scrutiny of people I respect.

Lessons like these keep me drawn to the feuilleton format. My readers have helped to make these years of autobiographical writing the most absorbing, enjoyable and meaningful of my long academic life. To paraphrase Socrates again: the examined life, in dialogue with others, is truly worth living.

I recently scored very highly on the ‘openness’ scale in a Big Five personality test, which puts a psychological gloss on the entire project. The feuilleton format showed my preference for living with open questions and unresolved interpretations, rather than striving towards a finished account of my life.

My openness also had an intellectual precedent in my training as a historian of science. There, I had learned to distinguish between ‘ready-made science’ and ‘science in the making’, as Bruno Latour had put it. The lesson was not to build historical writing on published articles and textbooks alone, but to regard research as a provisional process through which facts are slowly assembled and stabilised.

I think of my autobiographical writing on social media as something similar. It is, in the most literal sense, an autobiography in the making.

Even so, when I began this project, I took it for granted that it would arrive somewhere – that the long labour of extracting from archives, summoning memories, and talking to others would eventually compose itself into a coherent narrative of my life.

This is a common conception of autobiography as a genre. The French autobiography scholar Philippe Lejeune holds that it is a retrospective prose narrative; within identity research, life stories are regarded as a fundamental form of self-understanding – the view being that we all live in and through stories about ourselves, and that a good life means shaping a unified life story. Narrativity is seen as a moral ideal: the good, examined life is, by definition, a narrated life.

Each episode must be readable on its own; the reader need not know everything that has preceded it

But there are dissenting voices. The British philosopher Galen Strawson distinguishes between those who experience themselves diachronically, as a single self unfolding through time, and those who understand themselves episodically. Such people experience their lives as a sequence of fragments rather than as a coherent whole, and yet can be fully reflective and morally serious. Strawson’s chief witness is Michel de Montaigne – perhaps the greatest autobiographer in world literature – who moves freely between fragments, paradoxes and unfinished reflections in an open-ended exploration that never resolves into a story.

I learned how stubborn the narrative assumption can be when I tried to enlist my readers on Strawson’s side. Scarcely a year into the project, I posted a link to his seminal article ‘Against Narrativity’ (2004), expecting nods of agreement. Instead, I got a quarrel that ran late into the night. One of my sharpest readers, Christian, objected that we are not one story but many small, situational ones. I held my ground: I knew my own past as a heap of fragments, not as a plotted tale. Only afterwards did I see what the argument had really been about. Christian was reading continuity and coherence into my life even as he denied doing any such thing.

Looking back at my own feuilleton, I realise I am closer to Strawson’s episodic self-understanding than to the retrospective narrative of classical autobiography. I did not begin with the vision of telling a story about myself: I began with the basement archive, the memory fragments and the conversations with friends. I bring out letters, diary entries, remembered images and the voices of others, trying to do justice to a situation, a mood, a conflict, a crossroads. Each episode must be readable on its own; the reader need not know everything that has preceded it, nor guess what is to come. If there is a Bildungsreise, it is full of detours, interruptions, dead-ends and retreats. If there is a moral, it is local and provisional – not a step in an overarching arc of personal development.

The form itself works against tidying. Because I publish short, self-contained episodes in rapid succession, it is difficult to reshape what I have written into a narrative without readers noticing; any attempt to harmonise the whole after the fact runs up against episodes already published. The open feuilleton thus becomes a safeguard against the kind of retrospective and self-flattering narrativity that Strawson warns against.

I once caught myself doing the very thing the open feuilleton is supposed to protect against – and the form saved me from myself. Something I had carried as private shame for most of my academic life was a compulsion to raise my hand at conferences and seminars. After one such meeting in 1979, I had written in my diary that, as usual, I could not restrain myself, giving in to a ‘pathological drive’ to dominate the room with my questions: ‘I am conditioned to the moment of questioning a speaker. I cannot keep my mouth shut. My heart pounds; I feel an irresistible compulsion … What is this inner need to show myself off in company?’ The pattern was unmistakable: wherever I sat – a hundred people in the room, time for only two questions – I had to ask one of them; I could count on my fingers the few occasions I managed simply to listen. And immediately afterwards, always, the shame: not at the behaviour, which was harmless enough, but at being unable to govern the impulse. I posted this and asked whether others knew the feeling. They did, and the thread ran long and serious into the afternoon, 90 comments in all.

What I had not noticed was that, in copying out the diary entry for the post, I had reduced five words to an ellipsis. That evening I went back to the original to see what the ellipsis had swallowed. The five elided words were: ‘compare Harry Belafonte on Arholma’. I knew at once what they meant. The summer I was 11, the only child in a roomful of adults at a guesthouse on the island of Arholma, a summer resort north of Stockholm, I had been coaxed into singing and had chosen Belafonte’s ‘Banana Boat Song’. A few shaky verses in, my great-uncle said, loudly, to the room: ‘Can’t someone shut that child up?’ The line had landed like a whiplash and lodged there.

The genuinely unsettling discovery was not the buried memory itself, but what I had done with it. I had, in fact, already written an episode connecting that humiliation, explicitly, to the seminar compulsion – and when I sat down to write about the compulsion the second time, I had forgotten the connection completely and even pruned the clue out of my own quotation. I posted the recovery the next day as what it plainly was: a specimen of forgetting, almost in a Freudian sense – that one can write about a painful thing in a detached, factual way and still keep mislaying it, precisely because it is too uncomfortable to hold. The form had caught me, in public and across two days, in the act of reading my own life badly – and only the second reading, prompted by the readers and by going back to the source, set it right.

My own misreading is only part of what the feuilleton reveals. The comment threads are full of readers trying to connect the dots on my behalf – tracing long arcs and identifying turning points. This impulse to discern patterns arises after the episodes are published, in the encounter between the stream of fragments and readers inclined to see them as links in a unified life narrative. In that sense, the feuilleton functions as a laboratory for watching how narrativity emerges in reception rather than in the act of writing itself. I repeatedly discover that my critics read more continuity, more purpose and more personal development into the material than I did myself when writing it – Christian, in our quarrel, was only the earliest and bluntest case.

I do not see this as a pessimistic conclusion, but as a liberating one. Strawson’s critique helps me calibrate my ambitions: to aim for fidelity to the fragments rather than the false comfort of a whole. If one thinks – as many narrativists do – that the essential task is to shape a unified self-narrative, the temptation is always there to smooth over ruptures, play down contradictions, and tidy away whatever doesn’t fit. The drive for narrative risks crowding out the unpredictable, the messy and the recalcitrant that make up much of our lived experience.

What I resist is not coherence but the imperative to impose it

The process matters far more to me than the result; even so, I have not ruled out publishing the final text as a book. But that intention sits uneasily with everything I have just argued: to edit the stream of episodes into a single volume risks imposing a coherence that was never there. Perhaps a narrative will emerge in the editing; perhaps it will not.

Autobiography, as I now practise it, is a series of soundings of how I relate to episodes from my life in light of today’s feelings, knowledge and relationships. What I resist is not coherence but the imperative to impose it.

This is also why I no longer regard autobiography as a final report on a life, in which questions such as ‘What have I achieved?’ or ‘What mistakes did I make?’ find definitive answers. The questions I now ask myself are different: how do I bear the consequences of what I have done? Which ties from the past do I wish to affirm, which must I accept, and which can, and should, I try to dissolve? The feuilleton has become a way of living with my past: testing my reactions against those of others, reconsidering my judgments, and trying out different descriptions of the same event.

When I return to Kierkegaard and Socrates, I do so with scepticism towards the self-image I held when I began packing my papers into removal boxes. To live forwards and understand it backwards need not mean capturing my life in a single narrative stream. It may be that I never finish understanding but continue to try – episode by episode.

Socrates’ reminder that the unexamined life is not worth living is too easily heard as a demand that the examined life be a well-told one. I would put it differently today: the too neatly narrated life risks becoming a poorly read one.