About the author: Richard Freadman is Emeritus Professor of English at La Trobe University; he was the Founding Director of the Unit for Studies in Biography and Autobiography and an international authority on autobiography, biography and other forms of 'life writing'. A Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, he now works as a volunteer making life writing available to people in dementia care, palliative care and cancer remission settings. He writes and lectures on illness narrative, and continues to write autobiography and short fiction. He is married with three children and currently divides his time between Melbourne and Florida, where he has become an aficionado of alligators, and they, it seems to him, astonished observers of him. ]]