Authors of autobiographies and memoirs tell us the story of their lives, but each is a distinct literary genre. An autobiography is a detailed account of someone's life, written by the person who lived it - most often in chronological order, starting at birth. A biography is the story of a person's life written by somebody else. A memoir focuses only on significant specific events or time periods in an author's life. Memoirs are an important way of learning about history. An early memoir is Caesar's 2000-year-old account of the Gallic Wars. 'The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass' gives us a personal account of the abolitionist's life story. Today, books like 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X' or 'I Am Malala' inspire us. Not everything written in an autobiography or a memoir is necessarily true, but these genres continue to fascinate.