I think this piece of prose-poetry I wrote is suggestive; I hope you find it so…Ron
THE MOTIVATORS
I belonged to that generation which saw, by chance, the end of a thousand year life…the village shrank…distances crept nearer…wireless aerials searched the electric sky for the music… -Laurie Lee, Cider With Rose, London, 1959, p.279.
Modern children have no conception of the ordeal of ‘fear of the dark’ which was once a universal childhood memory. After 1920 this fear virtually vanishes.
-Richard N. Coe, When the Grass Was Taller: Autobiography and the Experience of Childhood, Yale UP, London, 1984, p.64. 
It is the duty of the writer to expose himself personally, confessing publicly those failings, those acts of cowardice, of which he is most deeply ashamed and for which he must be held personally responsible, thus setting his own security and comfort at risk in relation to the society he desires to serve. -Richard N. Coe, When the Grass Was Taller: Autobiography and the Experience of Childhood, Yale UP, London, 1984, p. 74.
In this permissive age the taboos,
the sacred cows have moved over
into a social and political place
while we seem more at ease
with the moral ones. If it is not
confession that motivates
autobiographers, it is:1 insecurity,
hatred, ideology, the horror,
misery of reality, loneliness,
the strongest need to define identity,
to journey through self and others,
a taste of paradise, some white radiance
of eternity where poetry is born,
the exorcism of some uninterrupted hell,
the story of change and alienation,
of continuity and difference, of some
new age born just the other day,
a Kingdom of God on Earth, perhaps,
while some ancient way was gasping
its last breath, with a richness dieing
and a new one spread out in its stead
with light, light spread everywhere—
first the literal fact and then the metaphor
in all its wondrous glory, a mystic glimpse
where all of creation surges up suddenly,
momentous, with urgency before
this embryonic world order of, say, 75 years.
Ideas rush at me like a gallop,
writing as self-discovery,
a dynamic unity in a vast multiplicity,
dividing and dividing in an elusive,
unnameable oneness underneath
a flood of reality, continuous, living
in and through others, knowledge, doing,
time travel in a single step
through the words of the Prophets
and my powerlessness before God.
Ron Price
4 August 1996
1this statement is about autobiographies since the time of Siyyid Kazim and the Bab, the first half of the nineteenth century.