Some 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. Others see no need for consultation. 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. You can worry about other people later, when you’re editing. In mid-flow, you need the illusion of privacy, not to be anticipating people’s reactions (which are in any case unpredictable). Most self-censorship is cowardly. 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.”
Everyone 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. 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. And the genre has reinvented itself to take diverse forms: lyric essay, creative non-fiction, confessional prose-poem and so on. You don’t have to be famous to write a memoir. And it doesn’t have to be cradle-to-grave: a slice of life, or collage of fragments, can be enough.
The outlets for publishing memoirs have diversified too. Small presses and the subscription publisher Unbound have widened the field. Self-publishing also plays a part, as does the internet: from online blog to book-length memoir is an obvious trajectory, since both are first-person discourse offering an intimate relationship with readers.
Like blogs, memoirs are sometimes accused of self-absorption: me-me-me. It’s an unfair charge. 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”. 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. 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”. As with life drawing, so with life writing: we expect nakedness. 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 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. It elicits responses. It coaxes chorus like a brushfire.”
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). Whatever their motive, most of the life-writing students I’ve worked with over the years are level-headed. They write to make sense of their lives or to narrate a piece of family history. Sometimes they embargo what they’ve written, because the material is too sensitive; sometimes they publish it privately, for family and friends; sometimes it goes out into the world. The potential impact on others is an increasing consideration. All universities now have ethics committees, and life writing is treated much as sociology or anthropology would be, with consent a major issue: have the “participants” (ie any living person who appears in the memoir) given their permission to be written about?
It’s not just universities that want to be ethically clean and legally invulnerable. Publishers do too, and memoirs can be a minefield. It’s hard enough being honest with yourself (Mark Twain: “When a man is writing a book dealing with the privacies of his life – a book which is to be read while he is still alive – he shrinks from speaking his whole frank mind”), but when you’re writing candidly about others the stakes are even higher. According to George Bernard Shaw, “All autobiographies are lies” because “no man is bad enough to tell the truth about himself during his lifetime, involving as it must the truth about his family and friends and colleagues.”
Luckily, there are writers bad enough to tell such truths, either because they’re foolhardy or they have scores to settle. Alice Jolly, author of a memoir about surrogacy, Dead Babies and Seaside Towns, likes to quote the American writer Anne Lamott: “If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
Martin Amis wrote Experience “to speak, for once, without artifice”. Not, though, with any less concern for “formality” – for shape and structure – than he brings to his fiction. There’s an idea that a memoir is somehow easier to write than a novel, because it is based on real events rather than invented. But as Joyce Carol Oates has said, a memoir isn’t journalism or history, supplying “a verifiable, corroborative truth”, it is a literary text, consisting of words that have been “artfully arranged”. We might read it in a different way from fiction, with authenticity more of a consideration than aesthetics. But the two are indivisible: the authenticity can’t exist without artistry. Truth in life doesn’t automatically morph into truth on the page. And living people don’t necessarily come to life in print. It takes creativity – hence the term “creative non-fiction”.
It’s a delicate balance. Too much artifice – flashy metaphors and show-off prose – and you risk losing the reader’s trust. Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss is a powerful study of her incestuous relationship with her father, with whom she’s reunited as a young woman. It’s a brilliant account of coercion on his part and numbed submission on hers. There’s just one detail that has always bothered me: one night she spots a cockroach in the kitchen and traps it under a glass tumbler. It may have happened – probably did – just as she describes. But it feels too neat an image of her own entrapment. In a novel it would look over-determined. Should she have cut it? Perhaps. In a memoir where credibility is crucial, decorative flourishes risk breaking that contract.
In life writing, any whiff of fiction breeds doubt. So it seems to me. And so it seemed to Thomas Hardy when he wrote of the “infinite mischief” of “mixing of fact and fiction in unknown proportions”. But it is true that the boundaries are shifting. There are parts of the world that don’t recognise the difference between novels and memoirs. And the teasing, vicarious appeal of autofiction, that most fashionable of genres, is that – no matter how hard we comb the text and paratext for clues – we don’t know what the author personally experienced and what has been invented. In 2003, if James Frey had published his A Million Little Pieces as autofiction, he might not have been pilloried by Oprah Winfrey for taking liberties with the truth. Memoir is different, though: its claim is that everything has been taken from life – that nothing is knowingly untrue. Yes, for the sake of readability, scenes may have been switched round, characters conflated, and dialogue approximated rather than accurately recalled. Readers can live with that. They know that memory is unreliable and subjectivity unavoidable – that when you recall a family event, say, your siblings will remember it differently. But unwitting misremembering is not the same as deliberate falsification.
Trauma is often the trigger for a memoir: an abusive childhood, a life-threatening illness, the death of a parent or partner. It may be decades before the experience is written about, as with Lemn Sissay’s recent My Name Is Why, which recalls his years in the care system. According to Byron, it’s better that way – you need to wait till the pain has been processed: “While you are under the influence of passions, you only feel, but cannot describe them.” Then again, books composed in the immediate aftermath of a trauma aren’t necessarily worthless; it depends on the circumstances.
I wrote a memoir of my dad, And When Did You Last See Your Father?, in the 11 months after his death, whereas the one about my mum, Things My Mother Never Told Me, took me years. One was about losing a parent, the other about belatedly finding a parent; one was emotionally charged, the other a work of research, drawn from letters written before I was born (and in that respect not a memoir at all).
Death is often the basis of life writing. But it can’t be all gloom: misery memoirs have a bad name. Let there be light – playful digressions and a graveside joke or two. Self-pity wins no friends. Even elegies have to entertain. You can be true to your grief without being maudlin.
The memoirist will always be asked, with a hint of disapproval: was writing the book therapeutic? But to Katherine Angel, in her recent Daddy Issues, “it’s the wrong question. The more accurate formulation, for me, is that writing is how I experience my experience. Until writing, in mere living, everything is out of focus.” Getting things in focus doesn’t happen in isolation; wider social movements also play their part. It’s probably no coincidence that all the memoirs currently overcrowding my desk are by women: Angel’s Daddy Issues and Unmastered; Jenn Ashworth’s Notes Made While Falling; Norma Clarke’s Not Speaking; Mary Cregan’s The Scar; Sinéad Gleeson’s Constellations; Alison Light’s A Radical Romance; Kerry Hudson’s Lowborn; a proof copy of the late Deborah Orr’s forthcoming Motherwell.
Though they vary widely in form, they share a conviction that women’s stories deserve to be heard. There’s a sense of empowerment about them, even when that means owning up to weakness. In the pipe-and-tweed-jacket days of publishing, they would not have made it into print.
It will be a surprise if the next few years don’t bring a rash of #MeToo memoirs from millennials. Each generation has new taboos to break. And breaking them requires new literary forms – fresh ways of being honest, fresh ways of venting rage. As Ashworth puts it: “Some days it feels like writing truthfully about her own life is the most subversive thing a woman can do.”
The best memoirs are always transgressive. They are alternative history – voices you didn’t expect to hear; candour that breaches the norms of polite society; episodes that seem shocking till you recognise their truthfulness. They allow self assertion. But they aren’t selfish. They have a unique story to tell – a story that resonates with everyone else’s story. Even their anguish can be uplifting, making us aware that, as Charlotte Brontë said, “there are countless afflictions in the world, each perhaps rivalling – some surpassing – the private pain over which we are too prone exclusively to sorrow.”.
How to write a memoir
1 Grab the reader’s attention from the off You can’t hit us with everything at once. You don’t even need to start with a major episode. But you do have to draw us in, establish a voice and hint at what lies ahead.
2 Put us there Make us see, hear, smell, taste and touch. In general use dialogue rather than reported speech. If the episode is vivid to you, make it vivid to us.
3 Dramatise yourself as the narrator It’s not compulsory to be confessional, but as our guide you should let us get to know you a little. You’re a character too.
4 Be strict about point of view If you’re writing from the vantage point of a child, create a voice that sounds like a child (in tone and perception if not vocabulary).
5 Choose your tense carefully The present tense will create immediacy but can inhibit measured reflection. The past tense is the more obvious choice but can seem too sedate and tidy. You may need both.
6 Remember God is in the detail The stronger our impression of something happening to a particular person at a particular time in a particular place, the greater our sense of recognition.
7 Use the same storytelling devices that novelists use – plot, character, voice, motif and structure There has to be development, a reason to read on. A sense of style, too: just because it’s non-fiction doesn’t mean it can’t be “literary”.
8 Give signposts Find ways to help the reader along, especially if you have a complex plot and a large cast list. You’re our guide and we need to be able to follow you – and to trust you to tell us the truth.
9 Be surprising Work against the material. The reader will bring her own experience to it, so allow for that. Don’t be afraid to find humour round a death-bed, say, or tenderness amid misery and abuse.
10 Pace the story It can’t be all showing and no telling. You may need to spend 30 pages on the events of an hour – then speed through 25 years in two pages. Be bold with chronology. Find ways to keep us interested. We’re in your hands.
