Why we connect with other people’s stories

Far from narcissistic indulgences, memoirs are declarations of individuality and shared humanity – and the sense of connection and community they offer is why we love them

When I was six, I found out my father was a murderer. I grew up coloured in South Africa. I built a road in New Guinea. I watched my daughter nearly die of anorexia. I relinquished my son for adoption when I was a teenager. I escaped from Vietnam on a boat after the war – and then, they all say, “I want to write my story”.

These are the stories I hear all around the country, a rhythmic chant of the desire to be heard, to tell the painful – or joyful – story of what has happened. That’s why I am tired of memoir-bashing. I’m tired of being told it is like reality television, where life is reduced to performance or display, that it apes social media where there is no awareness of privacy, that it is a symptom of the current disease of narcissism.

I’m tired of literary critics such as William Gass saying: “Are there any motives for the enterprise that aren’t tainted with conceit or a desire for revenge or a wish for justification? To have written an autobiography is already to have made yourself a monster.”

As a memoirist myself – and a teacher of memoir for 25 years – I’m here to say, William, yes, there are many untainted motives. Most of the aspiring memoirists I have met are motivated by either the desire for self-knowledge, a fundamental requirement of being alive ever since “Know Thyself” was carved on the temple at Delphi; or by the desire to heal both themselves and others. They have suffered “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” but rather than feel sorry for themselves they hope their story will help others through their hardships and losses.

Renee McBryde’s father was a murderer ( This House of Lies), Anne Tonner’s daughter had anorexia ( Cold Vein). Both writers wanted to understand their difficult journeys and help others. As 16th-century French memoirist Montaigne wrote: “What is useful to me may also be useful to others.”

For others, writing a memoir is about lineage and social history. It’s the storytelling that used to happen around the fireplace, for family and friends rather than the public. Minh Hien wrote and self-published My Heritage to celebrate Vietnamese culture, left behind when she fled her homeland. Stan Grant wrote Talking To My Country to let others know what it is like to be indigenous to this country. Theirs are the stories that make up Australia, not stories of ego but stories that bear witness to family and culture.

Others are motivated by the joy of creativity, the challenge of remaking a life on the page. In Only, Caroline Baum explored being an only child using the material of her life to create a story others could relate to. The self was simply an accessible subject, used for much the same reason a painter does a self-portrait – it’s always there. A painter is not accused of narcissism, why is the finger pointed at a writer who picks the handy subject of the self?

Readers have a huge appetite for memoir. Hachette Australia publisher Sophie Hamley says memoir edges ahead of literary fiction sales and memoirs such as Anh Do’s The Happiest Refugee and Deng Adut’s Songs of a War Boy have had spectacular sales.

The kinds of stories that emerge fall into three main categories: the extreme experience (my dad was a murderer, or I canoed all the way down the Nile); redemption (healing after trauma, illness or death); and exploring identity (I am indigenous, transgender, from the Outback, disabled).

But why read other people’s lives? What makes them relevant to us? In my experience, there is curiosity – what is life really like for other people? But also, because humans are essentially empathetic creatures – we have to know how the rest of the tribe is feeling to survive – it’s the desire to connect, the desire to be part of a community. Memoir says I am a human being, this is what it was like for me – and readers reach hungrily for that knowledge.

Memoirs don’t have to recount tragic, exciting or unusual lives – although that does help the publicist. It is easier to get media coverage if you lived with a Colombian drug lord, or you left the convent in your 50s and advertised for a husband, but good memoir doesn’t depend on what you have done – it depends on your “eye”, on the quality of your observation. You can be inspiring about the daily details of an ordinary life – look at Karl Ove Knausgaard’s brilliant evocation of minutiae in My Struggle.

It is no accident that national healing involves telling – and listening to – personal stories; the stories of the Stolen Generation in Australia and the stories of national reconciliation in South Africa. Memoir is a public declaration of our distinctiveness and our shared humanity and, far from being self-absorbed and isolating, it is an act of connectedness.

If others think memoir writing is narcissistic, leave them with Montaigne’s cheeky opening lines: “I myself am the subject of my book: it is not reasonable that you should spend your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain. Therefore farewell dear reader.” Indeed, farewell.