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“I’ve had a life and I’ve also had a life as a life writer”: Blake Morrison opens his tour d’horizon of arguably literature’s most expanding and expansive genre with a flash of his credentials and an implicit call to further inquiry. What constitutes a life, and what can it mean to write about it? Can you write about your own from inside it?
Before his bestselling and highly praised account of his father’s life and death, And When Did You Last See Your Father?, was published in 1993, Morrison had a life as a poet, a critic and a literary editor. And perhaps his interest in penetrating the mysteries of another’s interior world was already in evidence: a few years earlier, he had written The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper, in which he had attempted to capture what newspaper reports had missed of serial killer Peter Sutcliffe (“So cops they lobbed im questions / Through breakfast, dinner, tea, / Till e said: ‘All right, you’ve cracked it. / Ripper, aye, it’s me.’”).
The poem features in On Memoir, as an example of how form can be used against the grain of expectations to talk about traumatic collective experiences; Morrison also points to As If, his exploration of the trial of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, the 10-year-olds who had killed the two-year-old James Bulger. Life writing, then, doesn’t always mean your own life, and almost never only yours. So how do you do it?
Morrison’s response is a deceptively breezy alphabetically ordered guide, with Flashbacks, Food and Footnotes giving way to Persona, Photos and Plagiarism, and so forth. There’s plenty of cheerfully nuts-and-bolts advice for the would-be memoirist, culled from the author’s years teaching the form at Goldsmiths, University of London: the most pedestrian example might be not to keep repeating everyone’s names, and perhaps the most surprising not to write off self-publishing if you really want to get your story out there. The book also functions as a terrific reading list, encompassing titles from Olaudah Equiano’s 1789 autobiography The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, through Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and the work of Annie Ernaux to, more recently, Catherine Taylor’s The Stirrings, a memoir of growing up that also found itself compelled by Peter Sutcliffe’s crimes.
But the most insistent questions seep between the entries, recurring throughout and never quite resolving. Chief among them is: does it have to be true? Memory, after all, is a slippery customer, and although the contemporary exhortation to “speak one’s truth” might appear simply to encourage openness and reject shame, it also draws attention to the fact that others have their truth too. When accounts of events and their associated emotions and conclusions are contested, things can get messy quickly.
Should a committed life writer worry about what other people think? Morrison hedges his bets a touch: one should be as truthful as possible, and certainly not fabricate entire histories in order to deceive and manipulate (see Binjamin Wilkomirski’s invented experiences of the Holocaust). But neither can writers allow themselves to be self-seduced by the desire to be likable, or to quail from excavating experiences that are painful or embarrassing. You can’t mind too much, either, if your old school friend is cheesed off because you inaccurately remembered seeing his brother on a train (as happened to Morrison), although you should practice human decency when you’re revealing your father’s love affairs (also Morrison).
One of the most intriguing consequences of his A-Z approach is that you start to add your own entries. Between Likability and Loss, I wondered, wasn’t there a place for Loneliness? Not simply as a way to understand why people might want to write about their own histories, but to grasp why so many of us read them? Poring over the minute details of another’s life isn’t the same as befriending them, but can it make one feel – to use another telling contemporary term – “seen”? Maybe that should be under N for Nosiness.
