The further we move towards control over the reproduction of images, events and experiences, the more enhanced, perhaps even desperate, our attempts at capturing the real have become. As the site in which the represented other of character is made manifest through the viscerally authentic performer, live work has always shown a tension between self and the shadows it throws; and no form is at the same time as shadowy and substantial as autobiography. Because the search for the defining features of autobiographical performance has become something of a sub- industry in itself - a critical search to equate the paradoxical elements of facts and subjectivity, honesty and artifice - this chapter needs to come clean about what it will be attempting to add to the field, and also what it will not.