I’ve got my great-grandfather’s autobiography and one of the striking features is the language. It’s extremely matter of fact with very little prose to connect his life together, just a lot of details like “moved to X in year Y” and “went to school for X between Y and Z years”. It’s got a lot of facts, but little coherent narrative.

If someone is important enough to warrant a biographer they’ll put more work into the narrative but old autobiographies seem to be very mechanical records.

In some regions of the expanding USA about 150 years ago, a printed record of families in an area was sometimes printed and bound as a formal book. Part of the publishing model for some of those books was to solicit money from a person or family. For a larger price you could have a longer and more prominent description. Naturally some publishers had no trouble making flattering or "puffed up" entries, for a price. The simple entries in a book like that often were a listing of facts like names, birthdates, occupation or death date, and not much else.

Isn't a narrative just a way of presenting facts? Given facts, you can write a narrative. The more facts you have, the more detailed the narrative can be.