'Life writing scholars know Richard Freadman, a long-time professor of literature at Latrobe University in Melbourne, as one of the academics who have made Australia ‘the promised land of autobiography studies’ and as an author who has not hesitated to practice what he preaches about the importance of first-person writing. His monograph, Threads of Life: Autobiography and the Will examined how autobiographers have dealt with the philosophical problem of the freedom of the will and the ability of individuals to shape their own lives. Freadman personalised this issue in Shadow of Doubt: My Father and Myself , a memoir of his father, which centres on the question of how what Freadman sees as his father’s failure of will affected not only his parent’s life but his own. The seriousness of Freadman’s personal wrestling with the ethical issues posed by life writing, and especially writing about his own family members, was eloquently expressed in an essay, ‘Decent and Indecent: Writing My Father’s Life’, in Paul John Eakin’s edited volume The Ethics of Life Writing.' (Introduction)
