Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and literature at several Illinois colleges. In this essay, Kelly questions the description of this story as "autobiography," considering what it should properly be called.

In his "Afterward" to the current paperback edition of James Thurber's My Life and Hard Times, noted essayist and Masterpiece Theatre host Russell Baker calls the book "possibly the shortest and most elegant autobiography ever written." Now, generally, the words "biography" and "autobiography" are used to describe factual accounts of an individual's life. There are, in fact, cases in which a work of fiction is written in the first-person voice and the narrator refers to herself or himself as "I"; there are even such narratives that use the author's name for one of the characters in the book. But no matter how close they come to the facts of the author's life, these are still...