The second chapter of this study will challenge the assumption that fiction is judged by its readers for its aesthetic value, whereas autobiography is supposedly judged ethically. It proposes a theoretical paradigm of autobiographical works, in which literary autobiography occupies a unique position between conventional autobiography and the autobiographical novel. This is due to its creative and aesthetic value, which arises from narrative strategies that specifically aim to render ethical concerns autobiographically. In addition to my central case studies, Coetzee’s Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002), Roth’s The Facts (1988) and Deception (1990), and Grass’s Die Box (2008), a range of different examples of autobiographical writing are discussed here, such as David Beckham’s My Side (2004), Hillary Rodham Clinton’s What Happened (2017), Janice Galloway’s This Is Not About Me (2008). By drawing on existing approaches to ethics in life writing and the concept of performative contradiction in particular, this chapter argues that an aesthetics of performative contradiction enables literary autobiography to engage with ethical questions despite facing multiple theoretical paradoxes. Furthermore, the complex positioning of the novelist as confronted by artistic and autobiographical impulses simultaneously will be analysed and assessed as a condition for the ethical position of literary life writing.