Ten Shun!
Some of my mentorees seem to be under the mistaken impression that writing a memoir relies on a superhuman feat of human memory.
I can assure you this isn’t the case, as I have a very bad memory, yet my memoir, The Scent of Dried Roses, has been judged a reasonably accomplished example of the genre.
How did I square this circle?
Simple. By means of research.
Lots of it.
Because your life story is much more complicated than you realise. In fact, you don’t even know your life story, even though you have lived it. Most of it has disappeared into the ether or been distorted by what memory you have. So you may think you have the information lodged somewhere deep inside you to write a memoir, but you don’t.
You have to go and work - look, mine for information.
When I started writing The Scent of Dried Roses - which is a book with many strands among them place, family, class, country and mental illness - I simply drove and walked for days around the place I grew up, Southall in West London.
I had not been there for 20 years, and I was trying to see it with fresh eyes. I walked the streets with a notebook writing down graffiti, the kind of windows in houses, the state of front gardens, the commercial infrastructure - shops, pubs etc - the places of worship, the amount of litter on the streets and so on. What had once been a blurry memory began to come into focus for me. I was re-remembering a place, and it was a rich source of material, especially since it had changed so much ( when I was born there it was a white working-class suburb, now it is overwhelmingly Asian.)
To research my family, I sat down with every photo album my family members possessed and went through the pictures ( of course this was in the days before smartphones and everyone having a camera). I sat staring at these photos, some now 100 years old, trying to get a sense of who these people were - these people so familiar to me yet so strange and distant. Because if you are going to write a family history, you have to try and creare a convincing dramatis persona - and that can only come from research.
After spending much time poring over these old photo albums and trying to find out who everyone was - there were distant relatives, family friends I had never met - I then started to interview some of the family members who barely knew or sometimes did not know at all ( along with people I did know well, like my father and Aunty Olive ( who is 100 years old this year!). It was a surprise to find out so much about the people who were in many cases rumours to me. I saw ‘Uncle Tony’ who turned out to be an outrageous racist, and Uncle Norman , my mother’s brother, who I discovered had spent quite a few years in prison. All this was tinder for my imagination.
I also spent a fair amount of time looking at photos of me trying, as it were, to get outside myself, in order to get a better picture of what lay behind my history of depression. For instance, i noted that there was hardly a single photo of me from my childhood smiling. Was I depressed from the beginning?
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