How to write a memoir
Lockdown led to a boom in autobiography. Frances Wilson gives you her tips on how to tell the story of your life
If everyone has a book inside them, in most cases it’s a memoir. Time was when only the gilded and the good – celebrities, politicians, aristocrats and entrepreneurs – were considered entitled to share their memories, but the genre has now opened its doors to the general public.
Personally, I am less interested in what St Augustine or Elton John have to reveal than I am in the confessions of the crazy cat lady over the road, who rummages around in the neighbours’ dustbins and delivers bottles of wine to our doorsteps. Now that’s a memoir I would buy in hardback.
Last April, as lockdown was kicking in, I ran a course called How to Write a Life Story. Nothing unusual here; I’ve been running memoir, family-history and biography courses for over a decade.
Except that, instead of sitting with ten people round a table, I ran this one via Zoom with 150 people lying on the sofa at home. Two were celebrities, one a politician, and there was a smattering of aristos and entrepreneurs. Everyone’s story was extraordinary because there is, I have learned, no such thing as an ordinary life.
Coronavirus has released a nation of writers. There are obvious reasons for this: writing takes time – oceans of it – and an ocean of time has suddenly been made available. Plus, when the present is put on hold we are forced to reflect on the past.
Some of the participants were tracing their heritage through ancestry.com, and finding a host of previously-unknown relatives around the world; others were recording their experiences of cancer, or motherhood, or marriage. Plenty had been up in the attic, unearthing the letters of parents and grandparents.
Figures who had been as drearily familiar as faded wallpaper emerged from these pages as glamorous strangers who fell in love and danced the foxtrot. Families all had their secrets. One woman learned that her grandfather was
a bigamist; another that an uncle was a murderer; a son discovered that his mother, who had spent her life happily – so he thought – washing the dishes, had longed to be prime minister.
The most closely guarded silences were faced by the children of Holocaust survivors. Was it possible to uncover the tales your parents were determined to forget? This kind of detective work can become so absorbing that it forms part of the narrative.
The best family histories, like Ariana Neumann’s When Time Stopped: A Memoir of My Father’s War and What Remains, are also quests in which the writer describes how they learned who they were only when they learned where they came from.
One man, a retired headmaster, had decided to write the eulogy to be read at his funeral. There was no one else who could do it because he had outlived his wife and closest friends; neither his children nor his grandchildren had the faintest idea what he was really like.
The problem, he realised, was that he too had no idea what he was really like. So I helped him select the anecdotes that would paint the best picture.
Memoirs, like eulogies, are effective only if we are on intimate terms with our subject matter. Lots of people write about themselves without having a shred of self-knowledge. A famous termagant might see herself as a timid woodland creature, while a pennypinching miser might present himself as an open-handed saint. These are what I call Botox memoirs, and they are of little long-term value.
A good memoir is like a Rembrandt self-portrait: you must look dispassionately into the glass and record every line and shadow. The prize for the most self-critical memoir of the 21st century goes to Max Hastings, who describes his younger self as ‘charmlessly assertive’ and apologises to anyone who ever had to sleep with him.
Some participants were producing a record of their lives for their grandchildren; others had an eye on publication. Some were born writers; others had to find their feet. Lots couldn’t begin because they were concerned about ruffling the feathers of friends and family.
Would they be sent to social Siberia if they did a Sasha Swire? Was it possible, for example, to tell the world your mother (now in a nursing home) was a terminal bore and your father a repressed homosexual?
One man on the course was determined to write about the brothers who had made his life a misery, while knowing this would create mayhem. How could he limit the damage? A woman came up with a solution: he should ask his brothers to read his manuscript and, at the points where they disagreed, give their own versions of events as footnotes.
Another way round the issue was to change the names and alter appearances in a fictionalised memoir – also known as a novel.