Note: This is the first in a short series on memoir, I subject I have already touched on in posts dated 28 Feb (How to Start Writing Your Memoir), 7 Feb ( Researching Your Memoir ), 15 Nov 2022 ( Fiction, Autofiction or Memoir?) and 15April 2022 (Some Thoughts on Memoir, Life Writing and Autofiction). All these essays are available for paying subscribers in my archive. Just search ‘Memoir’.
Welcome back to the Boot Camp Tuesday writing sessions, and the Autumn semester (semester! get me!). For the time being my writing posts are FREE, although much material is behind the paywall for those seriously invested in learning how to write.
I started to think seriously about my own experience as a memoirist after reading this piece in the Guardian:
In this piece the author, Terri White, talks about her experiences publishing a memoir about ‘poverty, self-harm, physical abuse, sexual abuse, anxiety, depression, dissociation, suicidal ideation, alcohol and drug abuse, and being sectioned in a New York psychiatric ward.’
She says ‘Nothing can prepare you for writing a memoir, for it’s not just the writing. The process for me was one of revisiting the worst, most painful times in my life. Excavating memories that I buried decades ago. I had to not just dig them out, but summon the life itself.’
My own memoir, ‘The Scent of Dried Roses’ published in 1996 - and available in the archive of this site as a podcast, read by me - dealt with similarly painful material. My experience of suicidal depression and my mother taking her own life - possibly, partly as a result of my own depression.
Personally, unlike Terri, I didn’t find revisiting my painful past particularly unpleasant. I found it fascinating, because - as all memoirists should be - I was on a quest to understand something that had up until then remained obscure. My family was supportive and the critical reception the book got, which bordered on the ecstatic, more than compensated for any discomfort I felt in writing it. It launched a writing career that continues to this day, so I can’t possibly regret a word of it. I saw it as a tribute to and an honouring of my mother, and my whole family. I showed it to all the involved parties before publication to offer them the chance to edit it or delete parts. I’m proud of it, and if any of my dozen books survive beyond my lifetime, I’m sure it will be this one.
And yet, and yet…
There is one line in Terri’s piece that really struck me, when she writes:
‘Once it’s out there, there’s no withdrawing it. There’s no erasure of what is now known’.
This, for me, is the real issue that still troubles me. Because I understand something now that I never understood as the book was being written and published, driven forward as I was by professional ambition, artistic vision and the confessional urge.
That something is the importance of privacy.
I grew up in the very private England of the 1950’s and 60’s, when people kept themselves to themselves and their thoughts and feelings to themselves. I really knew nothing of importance about either of my parents, although I saw them every day of my life until I left home in my 20s. My ‘confessional’ - along with the whole wave of confessionals that were appearing in bookshops and in the pages of newspapers and magazines at the time - marked a paradigm shift in the culture. Instead of keeping everything tightly buttoned up, writer after writer queued up to offer their most intimate secrets and memories. We were naked before the world, and shameless, and we welcomed the warm winds of approbation - for our bravery, for our openness - that caressed us.
Now, more than 25 years after its publication, I view things slightly differently. It’s not that I wish I’d never published the book. I don’t. It’s just that I recognise the nature of the price there is to be paid.
‘Once it’s out there, there’s no withdrawing it. There’s no erasure of what is now known’.
There’s the rub. What I wrote in SDR was a snapshot of a snapshot of myself at a certain time in my life. You might call it a historical document. Whether it showed me in a good light or a bad light is neither here nor there. It showed me. It was as if I had pulled out my insides for the world to see.
So what? Well, for one thing, there’s a reason that none of my four children have ever read my memoir ( and I’m grateful, sort of, that they haven’t). It is because the job of a parent is to be opaque to some extent. To be a screen on which a child can project their fears, anxieties and hopes. A safe place in which they can behave badly, explode, and know that finally, nothing will change, that love will endure.
But what if they have to learn very early in life that their parents are vulnerable, confused and afraid, just like they are? How does that feel for a child?
Not great, I imagine. I could give you further examples of how this breaking the wall of familial privacy has repercussions - in much of my journalism as well as my memoir - but I won’t, because I have realised that I do not have the right to my family’s stories, especially when they are children and cannot give their consent one way or the other.
It’s not that I ever wrote any bad things about my children in my journalism. It showed them - in a private context. And I’m not sure I had the right to do that. I had the justifications that it was how I made my living and paid the household bills, and that everyone else was doing it, and that the writing was, I hoped, of quality that remained above mere tittle-tattle.
But it showed them. And I wish there was a way I could have avoided it.
There are other costs to the level of transparency I have given my life. At a fairly banal level, when I did a bit of Internet dating, I was horrified that my prospective dates might read my memoir and my journalism in advance. It seemed the skew the power balance - they could know everything about my life and struggles in advance, whereas I really know nothing about them at all. Perhaps it made no difference. Perhaps it even made me more attractive to a prospective suitor, who knows? All I know is that it made me uncomfortable because I had given my private life away to the world and they could join the curious public to press their nose to the window if they so wished.
So what? Well, so the fact is that is what is written down is not an accurate representation of who I was, let alone who I am today. There are echoes and shadows of my ‘true’ self, but I don’t know what my true self is even at the age of 67, so nobody should be able to make the assumption that they ‘know all about me’, when even I don’t know all about me.
It’s the point I make at the end of SDR, that things are always in flux and are always changing. Moments cannot be fixed in memory, people even less so. So - if you are thinking of writing a memoir that involves any kind of personal trauma - and what other kind is there? - be prepared. A successful memoir will reap many rewards, but it will be for you to decide whether it was all worth it. As the great Alan Watts once observed, if you count memory important, you must also value forgettery, the great veil that the past casts over our lives like merciful sleep over an anguished day.
By way of developing my suggestion, in responding to Anna-Rose comment below, that 'story' and 'memoir' are - like 'horse and carriage', 'bacon and eggs', etcetera - essential complements to each other here's a reminder to some and first 👀balling to others of the opening of Tim's memoir The Scent of Dried Roses:
'The time that I dream of, that I imagine, that I reconstruct more than any other, is a Monday early in March 1988. Oddly, I have never troubled to check the exact date, yet in every other detail I try to be meticulous.'
Some of us have also listened to Tim reading this opening and the full first chapter here in Boot Camp, and to his reading each subsequent chapter each week right through the final full stop that closes out the last chapter.
In writing his memoir Tim was writing to tell a story that could transport us from our everyday here and now just as much as he has done in writing his novels.
I've been looking back at others memoirs I happen to have read, enjoyed and have ready access to. And also picked up on some fresh recommendations Guess what? They all open and engage me with the sense of a promise of that the story that is beginning to unfold is going at the least to be a worthwhile read and quite often turn out be wonderful exemplars of the storytellers art.
As an open person and an open writer I can relate. Interesting what you say about revealing frailties to children. I think some of my openness comes from my mother, who showed so much to me and at a young age. She was severely disabled with MS and she didn't have the choice to conceal so much of what she went through. However I do treasure this intergenerational honesty that we shared. That comforts me when I wonder if my own children are witness to grim reality at times.