Foster argues for an expansion of the designation autobiography so that it signifies a consciously composed narrative of one’s own life experiences or a portion of one’s experiences. Foster observes when institutions collect the personal papers of ordinary people, the bus drivers and butlers, clerks, factory workers, farmers, nurses and nannies, even their own staff, in addition to those accumulated by the celebrated and the notorious, they find themselves in possession of scrapbooks, diaries, and other printed stories previously unknown. Still, such autobiographical works are more readily found in attics than in archives. They often are consciously compiled, handmade, homemade, spiral bound, tied, glued or artfully bound in specially purchased “albums,” “memory books,” “conference proceedings,” souvenir programs, organization minutes, and so forth. An expanded definition of African American autobiography that includes these texts provides a richer, more complex and textured view of what African American lived experience has been across time.

Chapter 6 examines the private memory of ex-servicemen who fought in the Middle East and Macedonia. It uses a source not meant to influence public opinion at all: scrapbooks. This chapter makes two arguments. First, it argues that scrapbooks were spaces of private memory and, to borrow from Pierre Nora, sites of memory. British and Dominion soldiers who had photographed the war and spent most of their service in the Middle East and Macedonia had to remember the war differently. Their campaigns bore little resemblance to the conflict on the Western Front. Ex-servicemen used scrapbooks as a way of actively constructing a past that was both recognisable and acceptable to them. Some ex-servicemen pictured the war as a relentless struggle against the Ottomans or Bulgarians, and the harsh climatic and environmental conditions of the Middle East and Macedonia. Others pictured the war as an exciting episode of travel. Others still pictured the war in chronological order, slotting their personal experience of the war into the narrative. While publicly, in memoirs, ex-servicemen made a number of claims that were meant to compete with the Western Front, privately, in scrapbooks, ex-servicemen focused almost entirely on travel, tourism, and camaraderie.

Peter K Steinberg shows us how Plath used scrapbooks as an early means of honing her story telling techniques and narrative skills, combining the linguistic and visual aptitudes that were present throughout her life and developing the art of self-performance and selection that are vital to any artist. Moreover, these relatively overlooked documents are a valuable source of key biographical data that amplify our understanding of the context out of which the work emerged.