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Presents literary criticism which critically appraises the book "Self-Same Songs: Autobiographical Performances and Reflections" by Roger Porter. In the book, Porter parses eighteen autobiographies, teasing so much from their pages and pages devoted to criticism of autobiography that his book resembles the interior of a drawing room of a New York mansion in the 1890s. Porter's study is critically ornate, so much so that it falls into a pattern, that of books crafted by teachers at good small colleges. Such books are so intensely decorative that they resemble walls painted with East Indian flowering trees of life, their embellishments so rich that they exhaust readers, forever distracting and not allowing readers space in which to ponder. The book has five divisions: "Autobiography and Exile," "Autobiography as Defense," "Autobiography as Self-Effacement," "Autobiographical Posturing," and "Self as Other, The Other as Self." Porter's book is heavy with statements from other critics, often the statements bring the reader to a beguiling, argumentative halt.