Abstract
Expanding upon theorists Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson's classic essay “Fifty-Two Genres of Life Narrative,” Andy Fitch and Jon Cotner's article introduces yet another life-writing genre: the “triography”—a triangulated narrative mode that dissolves conventional distinctions between first-person autobiography and third-person biography. Accordingly, their article takes a hybrid form, combining a definitional preface with the transcript of a three-way, improvisatory dialogue. Biographical interrogation yields to triographical narrative, a polyphonic form in which the presence of a variable third-party helps to fuse Smith and Watson's categories of auto/biography (“a mode of the autobiographical that inserts biography/ies within an autobiography”) and collaborative life-narrative (“an autobiographical text told by more than one person”).
