semiautobiographical
1
7.7
- adjective
- /ˌsɛmiˌɔːtəbaɪˈɡræfɪkəl/
- Literature
- It's Kind of a Funny Story, based on Ned Vizzini's semiautobiographical novel, breaks the jinx.
- a semiautobiographical novel
- a semiautobiographical film
- a semiautobiographical story
Examples
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Writer-director Noah Baumbach's squiggly semiautobiographical comedy has the freshness of firsthand observation.
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We may suppose the case is somewhat analogous to that of a semiautobiographical novelist who crafts an entire novel to fit in with just a handful of incidents that really did take place.
Academic text (2017) -
Based on a semiautobiographical novel by Wang Zhoushend, who spent four years in the United States, the play The Student's Wife attracted hundreds of thousands of Shanghai natives in 1995.
Academic text (2001) -
Carter tried (and failed) to learn Japanese, even though some words (e.g., hanabi), art forms, festivals, and customs inspired her; she did odd jobs for a living and had a steamy love affair in Tokyo that were all transmuted into semiautobiographical pieces published in Fireworks (1974).
Academic text (2016) -
The book's central story is a semiautobiographical tale of a poet trying to evade the Vietnam draft.
Antonyms
How Factual
Surface Forms
Morphology
semiautobiographical = autobiographical (semi-transparent) = semi + auto + bio + graph + y + ical
Adding semi- straightforwardly means 'partly' autobiographical.
Etymology
Semiautobiographical comes from semi- meaning 'half' or 'partly' and from autobiographical, which uses auto- 'self' and bio 'life', like the familiar word autobiography. So a semiautobiographical work is partly about the author's real life and partly made up.