Saturday, January 11, 2020

Naked Truth: How to write a Memoir

God doesn't promise an easy journey, just a safe place to land . . .

Leaving Communist Czechoslovakia is not like leaving any other country. It is more like leaving another universe. I will never truly be free of its gravity, no matter how far I journey. .. You learn to love. To fear. To hate. And then to love again. Through it all, you write, blog, link

Into every sunny life rain and snow must fall - I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures. ...We tell the story to get them back, to capture the traces of footfalls through the snow.

“I’m learning persistence and the closing of doors, the way the seasons come and go as I keep walking on these roads, back and forth, to find myself in new time zones, new arms with new phrases and new goals. And it hurts to become, hurts to find out about the poverty and gaps, the widow and the leavers. It hurts to accept that it hurts and it hurts to learn how easy it is for people to not need other people. Or how easy it is to need other people but that you can never build a home in someone’s arms because they will let go one day and you must build your own.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Another Vagabond Lost To Love: Berlin Stories on Leaving & Arriving

“Each of us is a book waiting to be written, and that book, if written, results in a person explained.”
― Thomas M. Cirignano, The Constant Outsider

Kylo Ren's fractured helmet and the Japanese art of kintsugi (broken pottery repair with visible "scars"). "The idea is to treat the breakage of the piece as a part of its history, instead of something to hide."

From memoir and self-care books to comic novels, writing about our flaws and imperfections has never been so popular. But can failing ever be a success, asks Lindsay Baker?

The naked truth: how to write a memoir

When writing your life story you need to be candid, authentic and artful says Blake Morrison - but don’t forget the jokes

‘I created a character called Will then set him running like an aphetamine-fuelled clockwork bunny’

Some memoirists send drafts of their work to loved ones, or even not-so-loved ones, and where there’s a response alter their writing as a result. Others see no need for consultation. Either way, when writing about your own life, it’s important to get the monkeys off your shoulder – to be uninhibited by the possible fallout of your words. You can worry about other people later, when you’re editing. In mid-flow, you need the illusion of privacy, not to be anticipating people’s reactions (which are in any case unpredictable). Most self-censorship is cowardly. In Elizabeth’s Strout’sMy Name Is Lucy Barton, the writing tutor Sarah says: “If you find yourself protecting anyone as you write … remember this: you’re not doing it right.”
Everyone has a book in them, it’s said, but as Martin Amis noted in his memoir Experience (2000), what everyone seems to have in them “is not a novel but a memoir … We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the CV, the cri de coeur.” Democracy itself may be under threat but the democratisation of the memoir keeps advancing. What was once a geriatric, self-satisfied genre – politicians, generals and film stars looking back fondly on long careers – is now open to anyone with a story to tell. And the genre has reinvented itself to take diverse forms: lyric essay, creative non-fiction, confessional prose-poem and so on. You don’t have to be famous to write a memoir. And it doesn’t have to be cradle-to-grave: a slice of life, or collage of fragments, can be enough.
The outlets for publishing memoirs have diversified too. Small presses and the subscription publisher Unbound have widened the field. Self-publishing also plays a part, as does the internet: from online blog to book-length memoir is an obvious trajectory, since both are first-person discourse offering an intimate relationship with readers.
Like blogs, memoirs are sometimes accused of self-absorption: me-me-me. It’s an unfair charge. In fact it often seems that those writing memoirs, far from being narcissists, need constant encouragement that their story is worth telling, that they’re not being self-indulgent, that it’s OK to use the word “I”. Chris Kraus, in her 1997 novel I Love Dick, recalls how “whenever I tried writing in the first person it sounded like some other person, or else the tritest most neurotic parts of myself that I wanted so badly to get beyond. Now I can’t stop writing in the first person, it feels like it’s the last chance I’ll ever have to figure some of this stuff out.” To figure stuff out is half the point of writing memoir but, as Virginia Woolf said, the reason so many memoirs are failures is that “they leave out the person to whom things happened”. As with life drawing, so with life writing: we expect nakedness. You can even make a case for memoir being the most self-sacrificial of forms, the author laying herself open for the benefit of others, who feel less alone in the world once an experience they’ve been through is articulated by someone else. As Leslie Jamison, the author of The Empathy Exams and The Recovering, a memoir of addiction, has said, the confessional memoir “is often the opposite of solipsism: it creates dialogue. It elicits responses. It coaxes chorus like a brushfire.”

I Will Never Stop Being Cold --Chasing angels or fleeing demons, go to the mountains ...

It's in those quiet little towns, at the edge of the world, that you will find the salt of the earth people who make you feel right at home.

The motives for writing memoir vary widely, from greed (celebs can command lucrative advances) to propaganda (the author’s experiences set down in the hope of effecting social change) to catharsis (a healing of one’s own – and others’ – wounds) to memorialising (to preserve a story that would otherwise be lost). Whatever their motive, most of the life-writing students I’ve worked with over the years are level-headed. They write to make sense of their lives or to narrate a piece of family history. Sometimes they embargo what they’ve written, because the material is too sensitive; sometimes they publish it privately, for family and friends; sometimes it goes out into the world. The potential impact on others is an increasing consideration. All universities now have ethics committees, and life writing is treated much as sociology or anthropology would be, with consent a major issue: have the “participants” (ie any living person who appears in the memoir) given their permission to be written about?

How to write a memoir

John Baldessari, R.I.P.

Eliot's love letters

Lipstick and resistance

Gertrude Himmelfarb, R.I.P.

Sonny Mehta, R.I.P.

Racism and romance

The number one song on the UK singles chart for the last week of 2019 was Ellie Goulding’s River, despite it not being available on Spotify, Apple, Google, or anywhere but Amazon (with one important exception). How the heck did that happen? Chart Watch UK has the story.

River was simply a prominent part of just about every “Christmas songs” playlist curated by Amazon themselves, a default choice for everyone muttering “Alexa, play Christmas songs” as they basted the turkey and cursed the sprouts. People have been spoon-fed a contemporary hit single like no other before it, and the result of that has been to propel it almost by accident to the top of the charts.

This is a fitting choice for the final chart topper in the 2010s because it encapsulates a number of trends in media that have played out over the past decade. To wit:

The song is a remake. Remakes and sequels dominate our viewing and listening.

It is exclusive to a single platform. The entire media world seems to be headed in this direction.

The platform is operated by one of the handful of tech behemoths that took control of more and more of the media landscape as the decade wore on.

Amazon. Arguably the company of the decade. Led by the world’s richest man, a symbol of the decade’s growth in inequality.

Ok, the song is exclusive to Amazon but is also on YouTube. YT has simply grown so popular for young people listening to music that media companies can’t ignore it, even when they’re direct Google competitors (and who isn’t these days).

Voice assistant devices were instrumental in making the song popular. Since Siri was first released in 2011, voice assistants have become increasingly embedded in our homes and pockets.

Amazon’s editorial team added the exclusive song to several of their Christmas playlists. Amazon has access to the song, compiles the playlists, and sells the devices to play them. This sort of BigCo “synergy” became standard operating procedure in the 2010s.

There was an algorithm involved (Billboard’s). They increasingly determine what we read, watch, and listen to.

And that algorithm was gamed. See also the role of Facebook’s algorithms in the 2016 US Presidential election (and many many other examples of “impartial” algos being manipulated)

Poetry and Trump

Beds and their fellows

Model railways are art

Some Aspects of Memory Get Better As We Age New York Times. Also a lot of what looks like memory loss in old people is poor hearing. Hearing aids, even really good ones, have limitations, and many old people are reluctant to keep asking for things they didn’t hear well to be repeated. They nod as if they got it when they didn’t.

Depressive realism Aeon. Of course, this fits my priors…..