I Wrote a Memoir

Time for the big questions: is it true, and is it really about me?

‘Memoir trades in truth, but memoir will never be true.’ Datch, who features in the book, has reason to worry about the fallibility of memory, aesthetic alterations, and self-as-character.

Hello,

OK, so – spoiler – broadly speaking, the answer is of course yes. But I wanted to touch on some deeper questions, where the answer starts to tend towards ‘maybe’ or ‘no’. Because, as the wise dog pictured above once told me, although memoir trades in truth, memoir will never be true.

It starts with reliability of memory, and I already know I am an unreliable witness. I was once interviewed by a police officer a few days after I saw a man being punched in Oxford, and I could not tell him the number of people involved, nor did I remember a single identifying detail about the people involved, nor – and this is the kicker – whether it was night or day. In the interview, I thought about it, and asserted that the attack happened by daylight. ‘According to our records, you called us at 8:15 pm’, said the police officer, ‘so it must have been…’ He tailed off encouragingly. Dark. Right. Dark.

It was a sobering episode.

Because I’ve been going on about it lately, recent subscribers (hello!) will probably know I’ve just finished a book that turned out to be mostly memoir, While the Music Lasts: a memoir of music, grief, and joy. Mostly – but not exclusively – memoir: woven into the narrative are other things like music history and music psychology and interviews discussion our relationships with music, playing, love, and loss. Through this process, I’ve become interested in the slippery things that happen when your starting point is trying to write something true.

The fact that writers change things – and often lots of things! – is the open secret of memoir and narrative non-fiction. A memoir is not a forensic account, nor is it a history. When truth can be a matter of perspective, and when memory is warm wax, it makes sense that we might not always cleave to the precise line of a story. But there is one sort of truth that must always point north. A memoir must be emotionally honest. It must be true where it matters. It must hit home. It must be satisfying to read, and that satisfaction, I think, comes from the writer relentlessly pursuing the lived reality of an emotional experience. This is important, and it is liberating. All the other details – when things happened, where things happened, who they happened to – can be up for negotiation. The people you meet in memoir are often – gasp – not real people at all. It’s not always wise to leave real people in identifiable states, and so all sorts of features get changed, attributes get collected into new constellations.

Put like this, writing memoir has a lot in common with writing fiction. And sometimes I wish I had written my book as fiction. I could have written all the same feelings, but would never have had to feel exposed, because I could always pretend that I made up those feelings and that they happened to someone else.

No such luck for the writer of memoir.

So if the truth is so contingent, who are you when you write a memoir? Where are you? What is that ‘I’ on the page?

I will always feel conflicted about the vulnerability of sharing personal events and the inside of my mind. But something that has given me courage is what I’ve discovered happens in the translation of experience to prose, in the fixing; how somehow, like shedding a skin, it detaches from you. Becomes something objective, for scrutiny. Somehow, although you wrote your experience, it stops being you anymore. It doesn’t go deeper. It stops cutting.

I like, and I’m curious about, the safety of how you yourself become a character, something aesthetic. Yes, the book I wrote is about me, and it’s about real things that happened to me, and it’s about my relationship with music. But it also isn’t. It’s an act of story, and about what other people might recognise in the story I tell. This ‘I’ I’ve created is at the centre of it, and yet I’m irrelevant. Any one of us could have had this experience, these feelings. The process is a curious mix of ego—the desire to be visible—and the desire to hide in commonality. It’s about letting go of a fixed sense of self, about giving away that shed skin over and over again.

Because. When you are on the page, you are not you. No one can get at the real you, off the page, behind the page. The parts you leave out. The parts you leave in become fixed. A memory is a changing thing. The one in the memoir is only one version of it.

And sometimes writing memoir has this alchemical effect on your memories, and it transmutes them. There are a couple of chapters in my book set in the town of Sherborne in Dorset. They climax with me listening to music my dad used to play and listen to in Sherborne Abbey. But, and to take you further behind the scenes, the truth is I didn’t listen to the music in the abbey. I listened to it while sitting on a bench outside of a much smaller church. The following day, I visited the abbey, and had a different intense emotional experience there, without music. When it came to the writing of my experience, though, this multi-church story felt unwieldy and I streamlined it into one time and place.

Now, having written the scene, edited it, reread it numerous times, it has lodged in my brain, just as sturdy as any other feeling of memory. I have to remind myself that I did not actually listen to music in Sherborne Abbey, in spite of being able so clearly to see myself doing so. Sitting on a hard, wine-coloured pew cushion. Hearing the abbey’s bells intone, almost obliterating the music.

Writing memoir changes us, too.

There was a time when this scared me. When I began to write about my father’s death, in part it was to avoid losing the memories of that strange moorless time, memories that felt vital, radical feelings that felt vital, that must not be forgotten, that must not be lost. It was a way of holding tight on to the time close to when he died, which in turn was a way of holding on to him, the time when he had just been here, and everyone still cared about his absence, when it hadn’t yet solidified into another fact to add to the collection of facts about us. When it was still outrageous, and outrageous to everyone, not just to our family. He was just here. Just yesterday. How is yesterday so very different from today? What is this rift in reality? That time when he still had plans in a future, where one reality overlapped with another.

I noticed how the process of writing brought some memories into the light, cast others in shadow. I notice now how when I think of the day after he died, often what I think of is what I have written about the day after he died. I go, have gone, there more often. It has defanged it. It’s easier to think about the writing than the reality.

I don’t know what this means. And I am still a little afraid of how writing my reality might have changed it. But the fear doesn’t bite quite as hard any more.

We all rework our realities, after all. There is no one true account.

Another time, I plan on writing a bit more about the contradiction in what it is to write memoir as a person who’s generally pretty private. I think I’m getting towards it in the above: something about never truly being represented even by your own words making it bearable. And I’d be really interested to hear from other writers of memoir about how they deal with the various sorts of ‘I’ that inhabit the brain while writing.  But for now, time to sign off.

Emily x

PS we are really close to having a front cover confirmed, designed by the incredible Holly Ovenden, and I can’t wait to share it with you.

And you can still preorder my book! (Yes, get used to this, my clarion call for the next six months). Preorders make a huge difference to debut authors like me, because they affect The Algorithm that basically predetermines the potential success of any given book, and preorders make booksellers more likely to take a chance and stock more copies. Since it’s hard to know you want to read a book without seeing it in a shop (at least, I think so), I would love it to physically be in as many bookshops as possible. So: please preorder it!