Times where somebody shares a disguised anecdote about themselves in Literature.
- In The Bands of Mourning, Allik mentions that social decorum is extremely important to airship crews, to the point that his friend got thrown overboard for terrible dancing (they tied a rope to his leg first). Later, when he rescues his crew from certain death, his captain mentions that it's almost enough for her to forgive his terrible dancing.
- Cheaper by the Dozen: During one occasion when the Gilbreths had a guest over for dinner, said guest told a sad story, which turned out to be about himself. (The children suspected it but didn't say so.) Lillian, in tears over her failure to see to a guest's happiness, hugged him, hence becoming his favorite of the children from then on.
- Chocolate Fever: Henry is cured of his titular "illness" after he meets a man named Alfred Cane, who tells him a story of a boy he once knew who also went through the same thing—who is eventually revealed to be Alfred Cane himself.
- It looks like this trope is being subverted in The City of Dreaming Books, when the protagonist (Optimus Yarnspinner) meets the Shadow King, who tells him a story about his friend, one of the few humans in Zamonia. About halfway through, Optimus stops him and asks if his "friend" is actually him. The Shadow King asks if he looks like a human, which he doesn't. However, as his story goes on, his friend was turned into a different creature, and he finally reveals that he is now that creature.
- In the Creepypasta The Devil Game, the end of the text reveals that the person writing down the ritual on how to summon the Devil is, in fact, the Devil himself.
- In "Dream Street Rose" by Damon Runyon, Rose tells the First-Person Peripheral Narrator a lengthy story about "a friend", which is all but stated outright to be her own life story.
- In the medieval Romance Novel Enchanted, the heroine explains to her husband that she's fearful of consummating their marriage because a "friend" of hers was raped. He doesn't suspect that she's talking about herself, and is stunned when she confesses to him after they finally do make love.
- Tom Holt's Falling Sideways features an ancient cosmic being who tries to narrate an important bit of history in this style, before getting fed up with it and just blabbing it straight.
- In "Father Brown's Story" a priest tells of a man, disillusioned by the death of his beloved sister, who turned to atheism and hated everything religious. Then one night he had a dream of a mysterious woman who he followed to the edge of the sea. It was his sister, who pointed at the ocean and said "It is the holy blood". The man awoke with tears on his cheeks and changed his ways. As they are leaving the priest stops one man and tells him "I was that man."
- In The Girl from the Coast, Pramoedya Ananta Toer deploys this trope twice removed. After telling how a girl from a fishing village was married by a rich man, lived as a prisoner in a gilded cage, and then was cast aside by the rich man for another wife, and was left to make her way alone in life, the author's epilogue reveals that he had just told the story of his grandmother.
- In Griffin's Daughter, Keizo Onjara, king of the elves, tells half-elf protagonist Jelena a story of a nameless elf man who was injured traveling through human territory, the human girl who found him and hid him away while he healed and how they fell in love but could not stay together. By the end of the story Keizo drops the third person pretense before slipping the White Griffin ring on Jelena's finger. The ring would glow when worn by a member of the royal bloodline, so its reaction proved beyond all doubt that Jelena was his daughter.
- Done inadvertently as the punchline in He Walked Around the Horses, a short story by H. Beam Piper in which a diplomat carrying documents from our world fall into an Alternate Universe where the French and American Revolutions never happened. The story is told through a series of letters and reports, the final one by a high-ranking British officer called Sir Arthur Wellesley, who is puzzled by the repeated references to this chap Wellington. "I've no idea who he could be
." - Played with in the short story "Hide-and-Seek" by Arthur C. Clarke. The narrator of the Framing Device is being told a tale of the Second Jovian War by the retired naval officer Kingman, who starts by saying he changed some names. The story involves a cunning spy codenamed K.15, pursued by a heavy cruiser near Mars, who uses the limited maneuverability of the cruiser to keep on the opposite side of Phobos. When the story is finished, the narrator suggests Kingman knows the story so well, he must have been K.15, and Kingman denies this and stalks off. The third member of the party explains that Kingman was commander of the cruiser.
- Played with in Fred Saberhagen's The Holmes-Dracula File, in which the Count narrates his first couple of chapters' events in the third person, before getting bored with the pretense and admitting that the "old man" he's been describing is himself. He even Lampshades the transparency of the ruse.
- In The January Dancer, first book of the Spiral Arm series, the frame story involves a harpist track down a scarred man in a bar and asking him to recount to her the tale of an artifact called January's Dancer. He starts by claiming that he only spoke to some of those involved and all are now dead or missing, but as his story goes on it is eventually revealed that one of the characters is actually him before he acquired his scars: he is Donovan, aka the Fudir.
- In Larklight, after Jack tells them the story of how his parents died, Art asked "Was that you?", to which his sister replies that obviously it was him, or else what was the point of telling them the story?
- In Matilda, Miss Honey tells Matilda the story of her mean, abusive aunt. Afterward, it is revealed that the mean aunt is the novel's Big Bad, Trunchbull.
- In News of the Dead by James Robertson, one of the intersecting stories is the artist Maja remembering the "dumb lassie", a very young refugee who arrived in the glen after WWII, unable to speak and named Flora by the couple who took her in. After several years, the dumb lassie is asked to sign a landscape she painted, and signs it with the name she remembers from her long lost passport, which is, of course, Maja.
- Nory Ryans Song has a variation, in that the speaker is not talking about herself, but rather the person she's talking to. Nory's mentor, Anna Donnelly, tells her about a little girl she watched over whom she loved because she reminded her of her deceased son Tague, but the child was afraid of her, and Nory knows that she is the child in question.Anna: [Tague] was always singing, never still. And after he was gone the whole world seemed quiet. I thought there'd never be another like him. But then, years later, I began to watch someone, a small child backed up against a wall...This child had such love in her, a laughing child, brave like my son. She sang. She climbed over walls. She left gates open. She danced through the cemetery and over the cliffs. And I loved her for that. Loved her always.
- In Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's The Palace, Roget tells a group of workers that his master Ragoczy is trustworthy because he once rescued an escaped bondsman at great risk to himself. When one worker scoffs that Ragoczy made the story up, Roget reveals that he was the escaped bondsman.
- Richard III in the 21st Century tells the story of how he met and married his first wife, Anne, to his future stepdaughters in this manner.
- Used at the end of A Scanner Darkly, in a rather gut-punching way. In the epilogue, Philip K. Dick talks about the people he'd lost to drug addiction over the years, and then lists some of them off. One of the last names is "Phil" — he'd discovered shortly before writing the book that he had suffered permanent pancreatic damage, which would eventually kill him.
- The Saga of the Faroe Islanders: Sigmund and Thorir spend six years in seclusion with farmer Ulf and his small family at their hidden homestead in the mountains of Dovre. When they depart, Ulf tells them a story of a young man called Thorkel Crispfrost who carried off a woman called Ragnhild when her father refused to give her in marriage to him. This caused a feud in which Ragnhild's father and nineteen others were killed; Thorkel was outlawed and made a secret homestead for himself and Ragnhild in the mountains. His story ends with the predictable revelation that he himself is Thorkel Crispfrost.
- In Shards of Honor, both Cordelia Naismith and Aral Vorkosigan use this device very early on in their acquaintance, when a discussion of cultural differences leads to Cordelia telling the story of "a woman I knew once" who had a romantic relationship that ended badly, to demonstrate that her culture isn't perfect. Aral reciprocates with the story of "a man I knew once" whose marriage was comparably disastrous. About halfway through his story, he slips and nearly says "me" before correcting it to "my friend".By this time, the little slip was no surprise to Cordelia, and she wondered if her story had been as transparent to him. It certainly seemed so.
- In The Sunlit Man, when Hoid begins to tell Nomad a story of a boy who once pondered the stars, Nomad turns and begins to walk away before Hoid even finishes the first line, definitely not being in the mood for what he thinks will be another one of Hoid's moralizing anecdotes. In a rare moment of sincerity, Hoid then immediately reveals that he is the boy in the story, piquing Nomad's interest enough to listen for a brief period, as Hoid rarely talks about his past.
- The entire Framing Device for Mark Helprin's Swan Lake turns out to be setting up one of these: the little girl who is treated to the story turns out to be the young Queen.
- In The Three Musketeers Athos describes his marriage as that of "a friend of mine". Then the hundred fifty-odd bottles of wine he drank over the last two weeks catch up with him and he slips into the first-person at the end.
- Recovering after a late night party, 19th century Swedish poet Gunnar Wennerberg wrote about an unnamed cousin, an "arrogant, belligerent, drunken joker" who behaved shamelessly at the party:As I write, he sits sour-faced staring at the paper. I’m sure he doesn’t like me writing about what he did. But if he opens his mouth, I will ask him why he flung my best hat out into the yard.
- In Jack Vance's Throy - the heroes Glawen Clattuc and Eustace Chilke go in search of a businessman who can lead them to the source of a planetary conspiracy and are accompanied by his secretary. When in the course of rescuing the businessman they are attacked and wounded by hostile aliens, the secretary unloads on the aliens with a blaster and saves them all. In a slight subversion of the trope, it's not the secretary but her boss who later recounts the tale of a former employer whose house collapsed long ago in a storm, leaving only a terrified and badly wounded little girl at the mercy of those same xenomorphs... Possibly also qualifies as a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
- What Katy Did: While Katy is at her lowest ebb following her accident, she receives a visit from Cousin Helen, who tells her the story of a girl who, like Helen and Katy, was injured in an accident and left unable to walk. This girl fell into a deep depression similar to Katy's and stopped caring about her appearance, until her father told her he "didn't want his Helen to turn into a slattern." At this point, Katy realises Helen is talking about herself, though Helen says she didn't mean to reveal this information so soon.
- In Wizard of the Pigeons by Megan Lindholm, the female lead has a tendency toward conveying information like this. At one point, she tells the protagonist a story about a group of boys, and at the end it turns out he was one of the characters in the story (although not the one he was expecting). Later, she tells him a story about a little girl, and he sarcastically predicts the "And That Little Girl Was Me" ending (and is so busy being a smartass that he neglects to actually think about why he's been told the story, and fails to learn anything from it). There's also a point where she tells him an anecdote in first person, but ends by saying that it didn't actually happen to her; she just told it that way because that's how the story is traditionally told.
- Near the end of the dystopian novel Devil On My Back by Monica Hughes, a character tells the protagonist a story that, although he is careful to disclaim it as a fairy story with no particular meaning or real-life relevance, doesn't take much imagination to interpret as a description and explanation of his own actions during the novel.
- In World War Z, one of the characters interviewed, Xolelwa Azania, tells the story of Paul Redeker, the South African military planner who came up with the amoral but effective "Redeker plan" to fight the Zombie Apocalypse, then went crazy due to his guilt over condemning millions of people to die in the name of The Needs of the Many. The end of the interview reveals that he is actually Redeker himself, imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital with a Split Personality disorder.
