This may seem unnecessarily facetious. Indeed, Richard Freadman’s Threads of Life: Autobiography and the will shows that will is central to how we live and how we understand the past. Will, as The Oxford Companion to Philosophy reminds us, is usually ‘taken to be capable of origination – the creation of a new beginning and escape from the past’. But as novelists and autobiographers keep reminding us, we ignore the past at our peril. Will is also central to the problem of whether our lives are free or determined (by ‘fate’, class, or gender, for instance). This problem is bound up with ethics, since the issue of responsibility is related to whether our actions are those of a free agent or determined subject. Will is related to whether we look back on our lives with or without a sense of guilt, regret, and so on. Humans are always saying things like ‘I will never marry’, or ‘I never really loved you’, or ‘I wish I was dead’. An account of autobiography and the will can help us understand how such statements might disfigure or remake a life, and whether such statements can have anything but rhetorical force.

There is a certain defiance in returning will to our understandings of self, since modernity has radically corroded notions of will as a free, or even a real, faculty. As Freadman argues, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud – despite appearing to endorse the will – laid the foundations for theories that view the human subject as determined by language, biology, psychology, and ideology. Subjects become sites of competing forces, so that will is barely relevant.

Freadman’s ‘graduated conception of the will’ posits the will in terms of a spectrum, and something instanced through other faculties. The more the will is engaged with affective faculties (such as love), the less it is free; the more it is engaged with rationality, the more it is free. Freadman takes into account the ‘cultural grammar’ that allows certain forms of life to be conceivable, as well as the ‘thinning of determinative power’ through factors such as time. Such a model allows individuals agency without suggesting that they can weave the ‘threads of life’ wholly as they wish.

Freadman, who heads the Unit for Studies in Biography and Autobiography at La Trobe University, has long critiqued the discourses of critique, as in his Re-Thinking Theory (1992). Though in opposition to the more fashionable literary theories, Threads of Life is a markedly theoretical work, drawing on narrative theory, Freudian theory, liberal social theory, and moral philosophy. And while Freadman eschews obfuscation, this work is scholarly in an almost old-fashioned sense. It is dense and erudite, and its close readings of ‘reflective autobiography’ are detailed and attentive.

‘Reflective autobiography’ is autobiography that reflects on the implications of the life being written and that posits a distance between the autobiographer and his or her ideological-cultural milieu (something some theorists would find suspect). Freadman’s close readings are of a small group of works by First-World, mid-century intellectuals. After a chapter on three will-deniers – the Marxist Louis Althusser, the behaviourist B.F. Skinner, and the poststructuralist Roland Barthes – single chapters are given to Ernest Hemingway, Simone de Beauvoir, Arthur Koestler, Stephen Spender, and Diana Trilling. These chapters are what really makes the book worthwhile. Though no flashy stylist, Freadman’s nuanced accounts of the intricacies of these writers’ life-narratives are authoritative and clear-sighted.

The complex consequence of Freadman’s model of the will is seen in these chapters regarding various ‘thematics of the will’. The first, for instance, on ‘moral luck’ highlights Freadman’s concern with the relationship between will and responsibility. Truth is inevitably ugly for autobiographers, and so Hemingway’s notion of ‘bad moral luck’ does seem an avoidance of responsibility. One of the best chapters is that on Simone de Beauvoir. Here Freadman traces a long-term autobiographical project that illustrates a changing conception of will, moving from an existential notion of will (where bad faith is the opposite of authenticity) to seeing the will as ideologically determined and so required to work to ethical needs. In his accounts of Koestler and Spender respectively, Freadman considers the will’s mystical element, and how will can be said to be weak, in terms of what Freadman calls ‘post-totalitarian autobiography’, (that is, postwar autobiography partly written to explore ‘the nature and implications of totalitarianism’).

The chapter with the greatest implications for Freadman’s theoretical position – his account of ‘will-less autobiography’ – is the most assertive, though not necessarily the most compelling. While it’s clear that Skinner cannot write autobiography consistent with his behaviourist theory, that does not in itself invalidate his theory. Similarly, Freadman’s reading of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes ignores the possible ironic and parodic condition of that text.

In the end, like the literary critic Diana Trilling, we’re left with a ‘deeply conflicted’ picture of the will, where rational, agential conceptions of the will are shadowed by deterministic, ethically neutral, and obscure views of the will. Freadman’s book is notably concerned with anxiety, fear, and conflicted selfhood. Judaism often seems to be related to this (as in the case of Barthes, Koestler and, most obviously, Diana and Lionel Trilling). Given the events of the twentieth century, this is not surprising. We might say, too, that there is some anxiety regarding the audacity of returning the will to autobiography studies, evident in the weighting of the book: its introduction, two theoretical chapters, two appendices, and glossary of terms.

One might complain that the texts used to illuminate Freadman’s thematics of the will are too narrow: they deal with a limited postwar, post-totalitarian world, when writers and intellectuals meant something more (even in Anglophone countries) than they do today. Certainly, other autobiographers deal interestingly with the will. One, Richard Wright, falls within Freadman’s milieu (he wrote one of the essays in The God that Failed, which also included essays by Spender and Koestler). Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy, paradoxically presents a deterministic Marxist view of African-American life, while portraying Wright as a self-made man who heroically (and wilfully) evades the determinants that blighted other African-Americans. This is just one example. What of those countless autobiographies that are less ‘reflective’, but that offer implied, or intuitive, models of the will? Or what of the autobiographies of ‘crisis’ that characterise our time, those works of illness, alterity, and so on? What could someone who has become a ‘non-person’ either because of ideology (Primo Levi in The Drowned and the Saved) or biology (Zasetsky in A.R. Luria’s The Man with a Shattered World) tell us about the will?

Putting this aside, we see that Freadman has presented a small, but significant, intellectual history that evokes the second half of the twentieth century as a time when will was both given unprecedented scope and utterly denied to millions. The ‘Age of Anxiety’ (as Spender’s peer W.H. Auden characterised it) was the age of dictators, new media, and the Cold War – the consequences of which we are still dealing with. Freadman’s humanistic work evokes the image of the individual weaving coherence and pattern out of ‘life’s threads’. But the reverse side to the woven image is incoherence. Freadman’s impressive book is similarly shadowed by ambivalence, and anxieties about the place of rationality, humanism, and meaning in human life. Whatever Freadman’s theoretical position, the ethical efficacy of the will is seen in his criticism, which illustrates that good will is not enough. Conflict and ambivalence surround the assertions of the will’s existence and efficacy. We narrate our lives to make sense of them, to see if we are free, but (as Freadman suggests) emphasis on the will may also illustrate our unimportance in the world. To write autobiography, then, is in itself an act of will, but one where the will is like an angel we have to wrestle to discover who we are, whether we’re watching Big Brother or Big Brother is watching us.