One's own life story

Question

The word "biography" means:

The story of the life of a person written by someone else, or the area of literature relating to books that describe such stories.

But what do you call someone's own life story which has been "related" or "written" by themselves?

I searched some keywords prior to posting this thread to the forum. I encountered some other words like:

1. Bio (which sounds like the shortened form of the word "biography" — so it is not logical to work.)
2. Autobiography (which is a book about a person's life, written by that person. Moreover, I don't know if this is a sort of the word that can be understood by the majority of people, while it sounds a bit stilted to me.)

So although "autobiography" seems to be a plausible word, it's a "book". While I asked for something that you can "relate" (something short and spoken- i.e. you can express it within one hour when you want to open your heart and speak to someone who you believe viscerally.)

For instance, let's assume that because of some quite unbearable happenings during the past several years in his/her life someone is heavy-hearted now. They have not had a good past and had gone through may difficulties in their childhood up to the beginning of the major problems several years ago. They need to speak to someone who is interested to know why they have been so dull recently and why they don't tend to speak so much; why do they keep isolated most of the times, etc. They'd probably say:

1. Come and sit. I want to tell you my...............

or

2. Come and sit. I want to tell you a part of my............... [here I think "autobiography" works, but I don't know about the previous sentence.]

So I wonder if you let me know about the various aspects of this subject.

Answer 1

Come and sit. I want to tell you the story of my life.

Though the story of my life is often used to describe something bad that happened multiple times in your life, e.g.

I asked the new girl at work to go out for a meal - and she got off with the waiter. That's the story of my life!

(source: Wiktionary)

it can also be used in the context you describe, cf. this article:

But it's not stupid at all. Though perhaps the facts of someone’s life, presented end to end, wouldn't much resemble a narrative to the outside observer, the way people choose to tell the stories of their lives, to others and—crucially—to themselves, almost always does have a narrative arc.

The story you want to tell will no doubt have 'something bad' that happened multiple times (probably many of them) so I feel using this particular idiom is warranted here.

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Alternatively, you can use the phrase you already mentioned, life story:

Come and sit. I want to tell you my life story.

The Free Dictionary defines it as:

an account of the series of events making up a person's life

but this does not carry a negative meaning per sé.