As Lejeune notes in The Practice of the Private Journal, "the diary is a social outcast, of no fixed theoretical address," a problematic profile that has caused one of the most widely practiced autobiographical forms to be largely ignored or misrepresented.

Lejeune’s scholarship has been instrumental in revising such intellectual snobbery (including his own, as he readily admits).

— Laurie McNeill [1]In this sense, Lejeune tried to establish a basic theory that allows scholars to better classify this popular genre beginning by providing a definition of autobiography: "[it is] the retrospective record in prose that a real person gives of his or her own being, emphasizing the personal life and in particular the 'story of life'.

Nevertheless, he concedes that there are multiple factors (memory deficiencies, untruthfulness or excessive candor, the chosen narrative method etc.)

Novelist and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet, upon writing down his own life in Le Miroir qui revient (1985, English translation by Jo Levy: Ghosts in the Mirror, 1988), opposed Lejeune's concept of the autobiographical pact, which sparked a lengthy controversy about the concept among French intellectuals.