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Write your biography in six words.

Putting one’s life description into only six words is the subject of a new book, Not Quite What I Was Planning.

This review published in The New Yorker gives you the flavor:

It started as a reader contest: Your life story in six words. The magazine was flooded with entries. Five hundred-plus submissions per day. That’s two, three words a minute. “We almost crashed,” an editor said. Memoirs from plumbers and a dominatrix (“Fix a toilet, get paid crap”; “Woman Seeks Men—High Pain Threshold”). The editors have culled the best. And, happily, spliced in celebrity autobiographies: “Canada freezing. Gotham beckons. Hello, Si!” “Well, I thought it was funny.” “Couldn’t cope so I wrote songs.”

[Visit Amazon "Search Inside" for a peak at some more examples]. 

Many of these six-word bios are quite clever.  Sounds like a great way to plan one’s epitaph.

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About the Author

Erich Vieth is an iconoclastic attorney, musician and writer living in the Shaw neighborhood of St. Louis, Missouri. He and his wife Anne Jay have two daughters, aged 9 and 11.

Comments (4)

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  1. Edgar Montrose says:

    “I never completely understood the rules.”

  2. Erich Vieth says:

    Good one, Edgar.

    I’m trying to decide on one. Here’s one idea: “Not nearly enough time to sleep.”

  3. Erich Vieth says:

    Here’s a couple from the book itself:

    “No future, no past. Not lost.”

    “Almost a victim of my family.”

    “I was and now I’m not.”

    “My life was a beautiful accident.”

    “Many hands have kept me afloat.”

  4. D. Minor says:

    Too much time, no real livin’.

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