The disclosure of a significant core of family letters that Ruben A. exchanged with his parents between 1942 and 1945 challenges some of the contents of his autobiography O mundo à minha procura which the writer published in the 1960s and shows how correspondence functions as the antechamber of subsequent writing. The confrontation between the two modes of self -writing discovers important differences between the results of the epistolary (Altman) and the autobiographical (Lejeune) pacts. These divergences are particularly striking in the impressions that the author notes about his period of academic studies in Coimbra. In the autobiographical writing, the aesthetically -effusive self (Blanchot) is affected by the filters that time and subjective memory impose on him, whereas in private correspondence there is less vigilance and, in a certain way, a more natural way of facing the uprooting to which he was subject