Writing/Reading a Life: the Rhetorical Practice of Autobiography Christine Halse University of Western Sydney, Australia This essay examines how the introduction/preface to a non-fiction text is constructed as autobiographical practice – a sort of ‘introduction-as-memoir’. The use and auto- biographical effects of rhetorical tropes (stake inoculation, metaphor and binary oppositions) are examined in the introduction that prefaces Massacre myth (Moran, 1999), a polemic account of the 1926 police massacre of Aborigines that was the cat- alyst for Australia’s ‘History Wars’. Using the analytical methods of deconstruction, I tease out how language, structure and a (seemingly) objective account of historical virtues are recruited to the project of autobiography, and illuminate the role of lan- guage in the construction of the authorial subject (and Others), and show how these are entangled with broader social, political and epistemological issues. The analysis underlines the dialogic relationship between text, reader and society, and the insta- bility of truth claims and the authorial subject of autobiography. INTRODUCTION This essay turns the analytical I/eye on the rhetorical construction of the authorial subject in the introduction/preface of a non-fiction book. Attending to Derrida’s invocation to put texts sous rature (under erasure), this decon- structive (ad)venture unpicks the textual crafting of a particular (novel) form of autobiographical practice – a sort of ‘introduction-as-memoir’. Attending to how rhetorical tropes produce the authorial subject, this essay focuses the analytical lens on how a potted memoir is fused with a (seemingly) non- autobiographical account of historical virtues and recruited to the project of autobiography. Illuminating the rhetorical construction and autobiographical effects of text (even when they do not appear particularly autobiographical) exposes the reliance of autobiographical truth on language and the entanglement of autobiographical practice with broader social, historical and epistemological contexts and claims. Auto/Biography 2006; 14: 95–115 © 2006 Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd 10.1191/0967550706ab044oa Address for correspondence: Christine Halse, School of Education, University of Western Sydney, Building 1, Bankstown Campus, Locked Bag 1797, Penrith South DC, NSW 1797, Australia; Email: c.halse@uws.edu.au