Although the recent thrust toward writing as interaction with a text has led to de-emphasis of personal-experience writing per se, autobiography, if approached in the context of textuality (in Roland Barthes's sense), can provide a model for writing as a means of discovering one's identity--of interacting with life as text and with the written text to discover and to create an identity. Loren Eiseley's "The Star Thrower" and "All the Strange Hours" provide models of this discovery and creation of a self. In Eiseley's autobiographical texts, the narrator is aware of his own fragmented identity and tries on identities, examining each and finally creating an identity from the textual fragments. This process is not beyond the student of composition. It does require recognition of the textuality of personal writing, interaction with the text, discovery of falterings and suppressions of thought in a personal text. Approached in this light, autobiography becomes a model for discovery and creation of a self through the writing process. (Eighteen references are attached.) (RAE)