A Novel Point of View?

I read a couple things recently that hit home: In The Mind-Body Problem, Rebecca Goldstein refers kind of sarcastically to "one's first novel (you know, the autobiographical one?)". In Beverly Cleary's My Own Two Feet, she remarks on the triteness of writing about a young woman's coming of age.

Darn. But that's really what I want to write about. And not in a self-absorbed way, like my life and my growing-up story are so fascinating everyone should want to read about them. More because even if it's an age-old story, no one has ever told it the way I plan to. And besides, college was one of the richest and most interesting periods of my life so far. I have the sense that even if I tried to write about something else, it would devolve into a college story - one of the characters would start hanging out at a local campus, or something.

But still. It's a little eerie that these two women, whose writing I admire so much, are already "on" to me.