They write to make sense of their lives or to narrate a piece of family history. Whatever their motive, most of the life-writing students I’ve worked with over the years are level-headed. The motives for writing memoir vary widely, from greed (celebs can command lucrative advances) to propaganda (the author’s experiences set down in the hope of effecting social change) to catharsis (a healing of one’s own – and others’ – wounds) to memorialising (to preserve a story that would otherwise be lost). As Leslie Jamison, the author of The Empathy Exams and The Recovering, a memoir of addiction, has said, the confessional memoir “is often the opposite of solipsism: it creates dialogue. You can even make a case for memoir being the most self-sacrificial of forms, the author laying herself open for the benefit of others, who feel less alone in the world once an experience they’ve been through is articulated by someone else. As with life drawing, so with life writing: we expect nakedness. Now I can’t stop writing in the first person, it feels like it’s the last chance I’ll ever have to figure some of this stuff out.” To figure stuff out is half the point of writing memoir but, as Virginia Woolf said, the reason so many memoirs are failures is that “they leave out the person to whom things happened”. Chris Kraus, in her 1997 novel I Love Dick, recalls how “whenever I tried writing in the first person it sounded like some other person, or else the tritest most neurotic parts of myself that I wanted so badly to get beyond. In fact it often seems that those writing memoirs, far from being narcissists, need constant encouragement that their story is worth telling, that they’re not being self-indulgent, that it’s OK to use the word “I”. Like blogs, memoirs are sometimes accused of self-absorption: me-me-me. And it doesn’t have to be cradle-to-grave: a slice of life, or collage of fragments, can be enough.Ĭhris Kraus, author of I Love Dick. You don’t have to be famous to write a memoir. And the genre has reinvented itself to take diverse forms: lyric essay, creative non-fiction, confessional prose-poem and so on. What was once a geriatric, self-satisfied genre – politicians, generals and film stars looking back fondly on long careers – is now open to anyone with a story to tell. In Elizabeth’s Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton, the writing tutor Sarah says: “If you find yourself protecting anyone as you write … remember this: you’re not doing it right.”Įveryone has a book in them, it’s said, but as Martin Amis noted in his memoir Experience(2000), what everyone seems to have in them “is not a novel but a memoir … We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the CV, the cri de coeur.” Democracy itself may be under threat but the democratisation of the memoir keeps advancing. In mid-flow, you need the illusion of privacy, not to be anticipating people’s reactions (which are in any case unpredictable). You can worry about other people later, when you’re editing. Either way, when writing about your own life, it’s important to get the monkeys off your shoulder – to be uninhibited by the possible fallout of your words. S ome memoirists send drafts of their work to loved ones, or even not-so-loved ones, and where there’s a response alter their writing as a result.
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