Two very timely reads as I play around with the idea (and write fragments for) a memoir about living across and between cultures, in those interstitial spaces which show that you never quite fully belong anywhere. Below are some quotes and personal impressions rather than proper reviews, merely to give you a flavour of these books which will certainly sit proudly well-thumbed on my ‘writing craft’ shelf.
Amina Cain: A Horse at Night. On Writing, Daunt Books Originals, 2022.
This feels like a very personal book, a look at one writer’s thoughts as she reads, writes and thinks about fiction but also about life more generally. It is full of beautiful insights, some of which were instantly recognisable, or convincing… and others were persuasive, or at least a good starting point for own reflection.
While the book will appeal most to someone who also wants to write, it is full of wisdom and great quotes. I’ve either flagged or underlined nearly every page in this book and will return to it often.
As a writer, I feel I am always negotiating that: when to give something explicitly to the reader and when to hold back, or when to give just a little of it so that it can be sensed rather than simply seen. There is great value in what can be sensed. And in a way, one of the things that allows fiction its sense of possibility and freedom is this choice of what to make visible.
I don’t believe in perfection and when it comes to fiction, it’s a value I don’t understand. Why should it matter? Is a short story, or a novel, or a work of art, or a film, meant to be perfect? Is it even possible? Do we write in order to create perfect things? I don’t. I never think of it when I’m writing. Yet I too have described a work as perfect… I suppose I meant that I was strongly affected by the novel… that it exists on a special plane for me, above other books. That it is complete in itself.
Is the self what we’ve lived through, what we’ve felt and thought, what we’ve done? Is it what we’ve gone toward, or what we haven’t gone toward but have instead intensely imagined? If we are writers or artists, is it what we have written or made? Or none of those things?
I used to feel such joy all the time… I used to think that once you felt intense happiness, it would only grow stronger, that once discovered it would keep opening up and out, that experience was like this too, that life became more and more open to you. Naively, I didn’t anticipate a closing down… And now I know. You take hold of your happiness and enjoy it when it is with you. You experience it with gratitude, knowing nothing lasts.
Melissa Febos: Body Work. The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, Manchester University Press, 2022.
This book is less poetical and more combative, but perfect timing for someone like me, who is still somewhat ambivalent about whether I dare to write a memoir or not, however heavily disguised as something else.
The author, who has herself penned three memoirs or personal essay collections, lays bare her credo: that personal stories, even of trauma, are worth writing and being read, and that women and other marginalised categories in particular should not fear that their work is in any way inferior. It is a call to battle and a granting of permission to engage in personal storytelling, although it also warns that it requires more than just ‘blurting out’ to elevate it to art.
Being healed by writing does not excuse you from the extravagantly hard work of making good art, which is to say art that succeeds by its own terms. There are plenty of mediocre memoirs out there, just as there are plenty of mediocre novels… Writing about your personal experiences is not easier than other kinds of writing… Navel-gazing is not for the faint of heart. The risk of honest self-appraisal requires bravery. To place our flawed selves in the context of this magnificent, broken world is the opposite of narcissism, which is building a self-image that pleases you.
The most frequently asked question in any memoir workshop is what to do when writing about others, especially when we reduce them to mere cameo roles, or portray them in unflattering ways. After all, memory is fallible, and others may have equally unflattering views of us and there are always multiple ways of interpreting the situations we found ourselves in:
Cruelty rarely makes for good writing. It can be pleasurable sometimes, both to write and to read, but it is a cheap pleasure. People often rely on cruelty for humor… but the prose and people I find funniest do not deploy their punch lines at the expenses of those who cannot defend themselves. .. writing cruelly is almost always a form of bullying… It is profoundly unfair that a writer gets to author the public version of a story that has as many true variations as persons involved.
The final piece of advice which I found very useful is that memoir is not about events, but about reflection and growth.
Successful narration of a memoir depends upon the careful interplay of the past I and the present… Self-knowledge, the insights unavailable in the past and acquired in the time since, are what give memoir its depth. It is not experience that qualifies a person to write a memoir, but insight into experience… You make the past known in order to know yourself as changed.
This does not necessarily mean that we need to be sufficiently distanced to those events to have the benefit of hindsight or be able to talk about them without emotion (which is how I initially interpreted it: if it’s still too raw, it sounds too angry or whingey). Writing meaningfully about the past, Febos assures us, simply requires a change of heart, even if our personal transformation is not yet complete.
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