Even though I wrote my dissertation on the complicated relationship autobiography has to fiction, I haven't spent a lot of time reading autobiographies or memoirs.
When I was a very young teen, I was fanatical about celebrities and so, wanting to know everything I possibly could, I read an unauthorised biography of Orlando Bloom, and later a book about the pop punk band Green Day.
Last year, I trudged through Morrissey's Autobiography, but it was so miserable that it didn't encourage me to dig any further into musicians' memoirs.
Since then, I have mostly avoided reading anything but fiction.
Of course, I'll happily dispute the notion that autobiography and biography are works of non-fiction, but I find it far easier to immerse myself in situations that are entirely fabricated more than most anything else.
This preference for fiction doesn't stop me from wanting to know about public figures, or any individual who is tied up with something I am interested in, but I'm much more likely to rifle through a few different internet-based sources than I am to sit down and read an entire book about their life.
Obviously, until I wrote my dissertation, I hadn't really thought about the lack of memoirs in my reading history.
I started to think about why I wasn't interested and wondered if maybe I was just uncomfortable with the intimacy of reading an unguarded account of someone else's life, or maybe if I didn't want to demystify someone I really admired.
But then, on recommendation from a friend, I read Patti Smith's extraordinary Just Kids.
It's a great book and it reads like fiction.
It was everything that I wanted from a life story, and everything I didn't get from Morrissey's dreary birth-until-now account of his life.
Encouraged by Just Kids, I tried Smith's latest book, M Train, and, propelled even further by that, I tried Carrie Brownstein's Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl.
These books, particularly Brownstein's, don't read anything like what I have previously experienced with autobiography.
They are considered and nuanced, and they allow their depiction of identity to ebb and flow as identity does in real life.
And, on top of this, there is an understanding among these women that their identity does not exist on its own, but rather it is tied to so much more than just their own moments and experiences.
Morrissey's book reads like a four-hundred-page list of everything he did to get to where he is now.
He foolishly makes the assumption that people will care to read a hefty stack of pages on how many times he was sued, or bullied by the press.
Smith and Brownstein provide context for their experiences, good or bad.
Of course, they are the central voice in the worlds they are recreating, but they understand that their personal experiences are not significant only in a vacuum.
While events in their lives might be singular, the external forces that allowed these events to happen are not.
For example, Carrie Brownstein's band Sleater-Kinney has been a significant musical presence for more than 20 years.
But Brownstein acknowledges they were only able to establish themselves as a band without being totally dismissed on the grounds they were only women due to the hard work of the women in music who came before them.
I've only read a handful of memoirs, so I am no expert.
Undoubtedly, there are many other well-wrought and carefully considered memoirs out there that I have missed out on so far and for that I am sorry.
What I wanted from this genre was an insight into how other people see themselves in light of their experiences and their achievements and, in my limited reading, that wasn't something I had ever found and so I gave up.
I realise now that I was worried about being bored by people I admire, but now I understand that those with an in-depth understanding of their cultural significance aren't going to weigh me down with chronological drudgery.
They're only going to make me insufferable to those around me when I won't stop crying about how important their books are.
Millie Lovelock is a Dunedin student.
