Goodies and baddies, truth and lies? Reliable memoirs are full of murkier stuff
DAME Hilary Mantel recorded the first of her Reith Lectures before a live audience in Manchester on the night of the city’s bombing on May 22. Her series of five talks, currently being broadcast weekly on BBC Radio 4, centres around the meaning and role of history, and our relationship with the past. As a writer and historian, Mantel’s extraordinary historical fiction is a potent brew of thoughtful and well-researched gap-filling and gives a voice to those who are long dead and no longer able to speak for themselves. “As soon as we die, we enter into fiction,” she says. Mantel’s hugely successful Tudor novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies (dramatised by the BBC), show that history and memory are dynamic. Mantel has come to understand that “history is not the past. It’s the method we’ve evolved of organising our ignorance of the past … It is not science, it’s humanity”. Presumably, Mantel’s own memory of her first Reith Lecture will be remembered through the filter of the killing of innocents at a pop concert and the pall of silence that descended on the city in the seconds and minutes after the bombing. Or will it? Given that each one of us experiences an event or fact subjectively, we therefore record and retrieve it differently. When it comes to our own personal history, our memories are not set in stone. All our memories are mutable and highly susceptible. There is no filing drawer in the mind wherein we retrieve sterile memories, uncontaminated by the vagaries of life. Our relationship with memory is influenced by our mood, our changing relationships with others, the current context of our lives, by whether or not the sun is shining. Given the malleable nature of memory, it’s interesting that our culture’s appetite for memoir – and, in particular, for so-called misery-lit – has continued to grow over the last 20 years. It seems we’re always primed for the underbelly of confession and the “triumph-over-tragedy” kind of “inspirational life stories”. All memoir has two narrators: there’s the intentional, conscious narrator, the self as a kind of writer/ producer/director. But there’s also a kind of ghost narrator whose spectre makes its presence felt by its absence; through that which is not said, rather than that which is said.
In effect, when we write memoir (even if it’s just in the form of our own personal notebook where we reflect on past experiences and events), we tend to include that which fits with our version of our “official” life story and sense of self, and exclude that which jars with it. Anne Frank, whose personal journal was published for the first time 70 years ago today, was certainly conscious of framing the character who still smiles vibrantly from the pages of The Diary Of A Young Girl.
The less thoughtful, less analytical memoirs are full of goodies and baddies, dark and light, truth and lies. Most of us exist somewhere in between because that is where most of life happens. It’s full of small things and rituals, seemingly insignificant thoughts and exchanges with others.
IT’S much harder to retain the memory of what your neighbour said about the weather last week than it is to recall where you were and what you were doing when you heard about 9/11. It’s the extraordinary events and experiences that get burned deeper in.
The retrieval of memories is an act of recreation, a rebuilding of something from the past. Each time we retrieve, we reconstitute them in different ways. This doesn’t mean the memory is no longer “the truth”. However, as we grow older and understand more about our own minds, our relationship with memory parallels this evolution.
As a psychotherapist, much of my work is concerned with the narrative truth of others, as opposed to the historical truth. There are few clients who remember the expression on their mother’s face from when they were only a year old. But many will have a sense of it, an imagining of whether, for example, it felt nice/warm/hard/cold. This is not the same as a false memory, but more a way of making sense of the sense they have of themselves and the world in which they live.
A good psychotherapy is similar to the process of writing a good memoir. By “good” I mean as authentic as it can be. We live in a world where authenticity is less and less valued. The stuff that gets the most hits, is the most sensational, the most fake (news), the tweets of Donald Trump. Who would want to be a fly on the wall of his mind when he writes his final memoir?
Curious though I am about the minds and memories of others, I think I’ll give that one a miss.