Writing The Story Of Your Life

PART ONE

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL THIS TIME?

WILD AND WONDERFUL THOUGHTS ON WRITING MEMOIR

Finding the Words

‘The fates will leave me my voice, and by my voice I shall be known.’

—Ovid,

Metamorphoses

The narrative of your own life is the most complicated story you know. It is also the most precious, and because it grows, develops and changes as the days go by, it is the most dynamic, original and absorbing story you will ever know. It’s the best story—you just need the perfect words to tell it. And the secret here is that you have those words already—that’s the good news. The not-so-good news is that you may need courage to find and use those words. Why this difficulty? Partly because the words may have been misplaced and displaced by years of listening to, and of reading, the words of other people, words that are often quite persuasive, and sometimes quite dishonest, and that are more than likely unrelated to your personal story. As well as these persuasive and dishonest words, there are also millions of examples of the careful, accurate, lyrical, wonder-filled uses of language for you to read, to follow, by which to be inspired. You need to be able to tell the difference between the ‘good’ words and the ‘bad’ ones, and sometimes people can’t do this so well without some guidance. Above all, you want to discover and use your own words—they will be best. To do this most people need courage.

Why Are You Writing a Memoir?

It is worth asking yourself why you want to write a memoir, what has led you to this notion. It might even be just boredom, and there is nothing wrong with that as a motive for getting going. Boredom or fear of death—something like that.

‘I started doing a diary because I was bored and I didn’t have a job.’

—Jools Oliver²

A diary is not the same thing as a memoir, but they are not unrelated, and apparently Jools Oliver’s diary led her to write her memoir, Minus Nine to One. One of the most valuable resources the memory of a writer can have is the journal or diary.

Don’t just ask yourself the question ‘Why should I write the story of my life?’ but write the answer down. The written word is a looking-glass; it will tell you lots of things you probably didn’t realise about yourself. There’s a British TV show where people bring treasured objects to an expert to find out what they are worth. What are your memories worth? Only you know the answer.

‘Who knows the truth?

Who tells the truth?

What is the truth?’

—Gore Vidal,

Screening History

The more you know about your motives, the more you know about the purposes of this kind of writing, the better equipped you will be to move forward with the task of writing your memoir. Your motives may seem self-evident—you want to recall the things that have happened, the things that have shaped you; you want to make a record of your life so that your children and grandchildren can know you, can know the life you have lived. Or, to be more grand about it all, you want to leave on the world a mark in writing, a testament to who you are, and how you came to be that way.

Robbi Neal expresses her heartfelt expectations for Sunday Best in her poignant Author’s Note: ‘I never expected this book to be read by anyone but my children. I started to write because I thought I was going to die and I wanted them to know who I was.’

This desire to express who the writer of memoir really is will be examined in detail later, through the example of Margaret’s Memory Journal.

‘When writing of oneself one should show no mercy. Yet why at the first attempt to discover one’s own truth does all the inner strength seem to melt away in floods of self-pity and tenderness and rising tears?’

—Georges Bernanos,

The Diary of a Country Priest

Some people suggest that the memoir is a bid for immortality. One of the leitmotifs that plays away beneath the surface of this book you are reading on how to write memoir is that writing can give the illusion of warding off mortality. Just the illusion, mind you. Memoir—and fiction—are pretty much obsessed with the human response to the idea of time, the passage of time, the meaning of time. I will come back to these obsessions in particular in the sections on ‘Time and Place’ on page 177 and ‘Self-Portrait’ on page 301.

People, maybe all people—I don’t know—want their lives to be noticed, acknowledged, remembered, recorded. I reckon it’s everybody. (I wonder how monks and hermits and such fit into this generalisation. Abnegation of the self is really the flipside of writing a memoir, in any case, so perhaps that partly explains them.) You, however, want to offer to your readers your unique observations of things, your vision of what life has been like for you. Since birth you have been to so many places in a literal and in a metaphoric and emotional sense that your source of material is actually endless, a bottomless well of ideas and images and thoughts and emotions. And a wonderful thing about writing the story of some of what you know is that the writing will have the effect of expanding the facts. I promise.

Important Message About the Exercises

Throughout this book, you will find twenty-eight exercises. Even if you think the task looks useless and irrelevant to you, I suggest that you give it a try anyway. It might surprise you—you might surprise yourself. I also suggest that you keep the exercises in a special file or notebook so that by the time you have worked your way through the book you will have a treasure trove of writing that originated in these exercises. You may find that by consulting and considering the work you have done on the exercises you will be able to figure out how best to construct your own memoir. I don’t mean to suggest that the material that comes up in your responses to the tasks will necessarily form part of the material of your memoir—the aim of the exercises is really to coach you in writing skills while at the same time stimulating your memories. Here is a little checklist for you. You need to write down your answers to these questions.

—What motifs keep coming up in your writing of the exercises?

—What ideas are dominant?

—What do you think is missing?

A writer who does not have a reader can become very discouraged. I strongly suggest that, as you do the tasks set out in this book, you try to find someone else who is doing them too, and swap stories as you go along. This will bring you a lot of pleasure, and will also keep you on track. You will both have a ready-made reader.

EXERCISE 1

Expanding the Facts by Writing Them Down Under Pressure

Think of a clock or a watch that had a special significance for you in your childhood. Write a description of it. Then keep writing for twenty minutes. Observe and enjoy the way the facts blossom before your eyes like Chinese paper flowers.

Setting yourself a strict time limit for a short piece of writing is very effective. You may be amazed at how much you can write in such a short time. It is only human to respond to the pressure of a time limit and to rise to the occasion. People in writing workshops are frequently quite shocked at how much they can write in even just five minutes, under pressure.

The Day Before Yesterday

‘I know that my early life was at one and the same time so common as to be unremarkable, and so strange as to be the stuff of fiction.’

—Stephen Fry,

Moab is my Washpot

‘Guess what happened yesterday.’ From the age of about three you have been constructing the narrative of your life in language—you have been remembering the events of the day before, imagining them back to life, reflecting on them, ordering the narrative, and choosing the words. And words are the business of writing the story of your life. The whole exercise of recalling events and images and feelings, of imagining, reflecting, ordering and choosing the language for them, happens more or less simultaneously within the framework of life’s urgencies. But it is well to develop a respect for language and forms, to develop an interest in and an awareness of the diversity and power and beauty of words, and of some of the structures people may use to best tell any story. Never forget that the story of your life is a story, a long, long narrative made up of millions of short stories. And you don’t just want the reader to see what you saw, but also to feel some of what you felt.

‘If we try to recollect what happened to us in the earliest years of childhood, we often confuse what we have heard from others with what is really a possession of our own, derived from what we ourselves witnessed.’

—Sigmund Freud,

Art and Literature

The little child moves on and may not seem to bother to retain the story of the day before yesterday, being caught up in the wonders of today and the imaginative hopes for the future. But the traces of much of what has happened to you remain with you. Sometimes it is difficult or impossible to sort out what you really remember and what other people have told you about the past. Frankly, I don’t think the distinction is particularly important, generally, when you are writing memoir. Freud had much to say about this kind of thing.

Call upon Mnemosyne, goddess of memory and mother of the muses. She can guide you through the labyrinths of your past.

‘All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find.’

—Dylan Thomas,

A Child’s Christmas in Wales

Colette, in her autobiography, Earthly Paradise, wrote of returning to her childhood home out of a ‘desire to observe the exact relation of memory to the sites which shaped it’. And she found that many things still ‘fitted faithfully beneath the tracing which I always carry with me’. That is a lovely metaphor for memory—the image of an old-fashioned sheet of tracing paper. It seems to me to be somehow even more apt than the idea of a photograph or a photocopy as metaphor. There is a tracing, there are traces of your life, that you do carry with you. And the image suggests the picture of Colette carrying the sheet of tracing paper and overlaying it reverently on the place where she spent her childhood. It is also telling that Colette returned to the house where she grew up, for such houses are very very rich in memories. I know that sounds like an obvious thing to say—but it probably can’t be said often enough. Not just said, but acted upon. If it is possible for you to go to the house, the street, the school, the park where you spent your early years, please do this. You will find there a deep and fertile source of inspiration.

Dylan Thomas can reach into your imagination with a word—in the quotation here of his I think the great word is ‘plunge’. Now there’s a verb for you. Verbs are so very powerful, and can carry a great deal of imagery.

Psychological Ghosts

‘Some people have unresolved memories—something like ghosts in the psychological sense, and they can’t exorcise them. Much of my writing is energised by that.’

—Joyce Carol Oates³

You may find that the metaphor of the unexorcised ghost in the quotation here by Joyce Carol Oates appeals to you as a source of the energy of your own memoir writing. It is a powerful description of the impulse to rediscover, re-create the past life in its own words. And these words themselves—‘rediscover, re-create’—are, as words always are, much much more than carriers of information; they are agents of emotion, bearers of the imagination, shapers of meaning. Personally I love the term ‘psychological ghosts’. I think that it really describes with such precision the effects that the past of the writer has on almost any writing, not just memoir.

Is it Revenge?

‘My main asset in the role I play as storyteller is that I am not angry.’

—Boori Pryor,

Maybe Tomorrow

Everyone has been hurt by someone. Desire for revenge for injury is, I think, probably a deeply human primal emotion, part of survival. It is possible to set out with your memoir in order to punish people who have hurt you. Personal rage and revenge may fuel your pen, and if this is the case, you will probably tell your tale without the need for much guidance. Although it is always important to bear in mind that there can be a gap between the feeling and the ability to express the feeling well. And there is a distinction between anger and revenge. Angry writing can be a powerful vehicle for some kind of change, personal or social, but in fact it seems to me that in most cases life is likely to take care of your enemies without your having to attack them in your memoir. And don’t ever forget that the best weapon, in fact, could be humour.

Naturally your grievances will surface in the course of your story, but setting out with an axe in your hand and murder in your heart is maybe not the way to go. When the writer sets out with revenge as the driving motive for the writing, he or she sometimes ends up as the victim of their own plot. For writing, in particular personal writing, has the effect of exposing the writer, and the writer who aims to wound can also get very very hurt. I think that the unfinished memoir, Answered Prayers, of Truman Capote is a case in point here. He set out to report on the foibles and faults of others, and to exact a certain degree of pleasure from revenge, and it all backfired very badly when everybody turned on him in rage. That said, many people consider all writing to be a form of revenge, anyhow. It seems to me that the best place for teeth-bared revenge writing is more likely to be in fiction than memoir. Think about that.

The fiction writer has the opportunity not only to stand right back from the events, but to also create from the elements of recalled realities characters and situations that present in possibly a richer and more artful way the elements of the original inspiration. That’s when the fiction is really working well.

‘Revenge is all it is, but what’s wrong with revenge?’

—Truman Capote,

In Cold Blood⁴

I think Jane Eyre is just one good example of a novel functioning as a powerful exposé of past wrongs. The sections at Lowood School draw on Charlotte Brontë’s personal experience, the character of Mr Brocklehurst being apparently close enough to reality for the original to have threatened to sue. If Charlotte had written a memoir of her schooldays, the world probably would never have had the chance to read about the man, but placed within the structure of the novel, the school will remain forever vivid in all its horrors in the imaginations of millions of readers. Novels offer the writer such vast scope for the free creation of worlds. Not that I want to put you off writing your memoir—I am just musing, really, on the possibilities for revenge in the two forms, novel and memoir. Revenge and spite, particularly in fiction, do not have to be angry and out of control, either. Things so often come back to a question of control. Take Beloved by Toni Morrison. It is a beautiful example of rage, at the history of the African American people, controlled in the writer to emerge fully blazing in the fiction. The original rage of a writer can translate into a delicious sense of her own serene power.

Remember that Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is in fact a novel. Readers are I think inclined to register the work as some kind of memoir anyway. There’s a good deal of revenge happening in it.

David Copperfield is another case where the life of the novelist is seen as if in high relief through the dramas of the fiction. Nabokov tells the story in his memoir, Speak Memory, of his disappointment on discovering that someone named Kretschmar had first identified a rare Volgan moth, when Nabokov had believed himself to be the first to see it. ‘I got even with the first discoverer of my moth by giving his own name to a blind man in a novel.’ So if revenge is your motive, think about writing a novel. It might be good fun.

EXERCISE 2

Revenge List

Why not make a list of all the people you would like to pay back for perceived hurt? The vile nun who was supposed to be the student counsellor at your school; the ratty kid who stole your Gameboy; the girl who stood you up at the altar. You might even be surprised to find the list short—even blank. Even if it is blank, the long, short or empty list will give you material to consider for inclusion in your memoir. Perhaps you need to work out why it is empty.

To enter this project of memoir with a mean spirit is to risk disappointment of some kind. Or something worse. Memoir writing really requires an openness and generosity of spirit—it requires the joy of curiosity. Curiosity is one of the greatest gifts that human beings have. Curiosity and imagination, along with compassion, are the markers, I believe, of being human. That is not to say that a memoir can’t seek to expose truths of past wrongs. Stories of injustice, stories of war, stories of the Jewish Holocaust, stories of cruelty, stories of dispossessed people—these are all stories filled with painful and desperate truths that must be revealed in order to illuminate the darkness that inhabits many areas of human history. It is impossible to exaggerate the good that The Diary of Anne Frank, written by Anne when she was in hiding from the Nazis, has done.

The Four Stages

Whatever it is that drives you to write your memoir, the process will essentially be covered in Part Two in the four stages of:

—Recollecting

—Imagining

—Constructing

—Choosing the Words

I can promise that, before long, the words will be choosing you, but you need to have the courage to allow that to happen. It will take a certain discipline, for writing the story that is worthy of your past, whatever the nature of that past, requires a structured approach, and a joyful dedication to the task. I do happen to know, though, that the real discipline often develops because of the passionate dedication to the task of memoir writing. It gets so that you can’t help yourself—because constructing this memoir becomes so pleasurable and so urgent. But planning can give you a framework. People frequently ask me about my life as a writer, and when I tell them that I get up very early to write they comment that I must be very disciplined. But that is not how I see it. I get up to write because I want to, because that is what I do, because that is what I am, because the work itself demands it. I do not impose the discipline from the outside. Somehow it comes from the inside.

Who is Your Reader?

‘I long for a day of judgement when the plot lines of our lives will be neatly tied, and all puzzles explained, and the meaning of events made clear.’

—Fay Weldon,

Auto Da Fay

By the time you are an adult you have spent countless hours recalling (and perhaps, alas, in many cases, forgetting) your story and shaping it—in spoken words, written words, and in those secret images and words that play in the dramatic internal theatre of the mind. I speak of the shaping of memory. To speak of such things raises the notion that memory has a flexible and changing quality. It seems that it is not really like a photograph or a film or an audio tape—media that can be fixed in a certain form (although advances in technology now give them also great and even alarming flexibility). As you work—mostly unconsciously I think—with the stuff of your memory, you are really engaging in an endeavour to make meaning. Your unconscious mind is the location of much of your material, and when you allow yourself access to your unconscious, freely and openly, you will discover a richness you had possibly never ever imagined.

You are in fact creating the stories of your own memory; you are not simply ‘recalling’ and ‘recording’ them. Memory, like life, is a work in progress. You might be writing an account of your time in Vietnam during the war or simply the story of your days at boarding school, and how you write it and the words you choose will really matter, will really have an effect