I took a class in college called The Autobiography taught by an English professor named Michael Wood . Professor Wood is an academic author who has written on Proust and Nabokov among other very tough literary nuts and he is also a critic who writes about movies and books . He ended up being my thesis advisor in college and helped me to start my first novel, Selector. The class was called simply The Autobiography. In that class I remember reading Ted Hughes' (read Hawk Roosting ) comments on his wife's (Sylvia Plath's) biographers in which he calls them "Biografiends" as if they were metaphysical bodysnatchers, graverobbing ghouls. I remember thinking, "Why does he even let them get to him?"