In her autobiography Athqal min Radwā: Maqāṭiʿ min Sīrah Dhātiyyah (2013) (Heavier than Radwa: Fragments of an Autobiography), late Egyptian scholar and author Radwa Ashour (1946–2014) draws the attention of the reader to the psychological and cognitive processes of life writing as she herself experiences it. In a chapter entitled ‘A Short Essay on Writing’, Ashour metatextually reflects an awareness of the theoretical protocols of autobiographical narration which presume that:

While Ashour does not completely dismiss these conventional assumptions on autobiographical writing, she considers them to be ‘only partly relevant’ (ibid.: 252). She queries the importance of linearity in the process of life writing, the pre-existence of a plot and characters waiting to be mediated, the writer’s presumed prior knowledge and a clear sense of understanding of his/her life and relationships and the accuracy of memory and its relationship with fiction in the autobiographical act. Ashour closes her chapter with the following reflection:

Ashour dismisses the prescribed conventions of life writing which monolithically attempt to frame the practice within a single format and process, and in doing so tend to discard the idiosyncrasies of the life of the writing subject.