Carmel Bird - Writing The Story Of Your Life

The fates will leave me my voice, and by my voice I shall be known.

Ovid,

Metamorphoses

The narrative of your own life is the most complicated story you know. It is also the most precious, and because it grows, develops and changes as the days go by, it is the most dynamic, original and absorbing story you will ever know. Its the best storyyou just need the perfect words to tell it. And the secret here is that you have those words alreadythats the good news. The not-so-good news is that you may need courage to find and use those words. Why this difficulty? Partly because the words may have been misplaced and displaced by years of listening to, and of reading, the words of other people, words that are often quite persuasive, and sometimes quite dishonest, and that are more than likely unrelated to your personal story. As well as these persuasive and dishonest words, there are also millions of examples of the careful, accurate, lyrical, wonder-filled uses of language for you to read, to follow, by which to be inspired. You need to be able to tell the difference between the good words and the bad ones, and sometimes people cant do this so well without some guidance. Above all, you want to discover and use your own wordsthey will be best. To do this most people need courage.

It is worth asking yourself why you want to write a memoir, what has led you to this notion. It might even be just boredom, and there is nothing wrong with that as a motive for getting going. Boredom or fear of deathsomething like that.

I started doing a diary because I was bored and I didnt have a job.

Jools Oliver

A diary is not the same thing as a memoir, but they are not unrelated, and apparently Jools Olivers diary led her to write her memoir, Minus Nine to One. One of the most valuable resources the memory of a writer can have is the journal or diary.

Dont just ask yourself the question Why should I write the story of my life? but write the answer down. The written word is a looking-glass; it will tell you lots of things you probably didnt realise about yourself. Theres a British TV show where people bring treasured objects to an expert to find out what they are worth. What are your memories worth? Only you know the answer.

Who knows the truth?

Who tells the truth?

What is the truth?

Gore Vidal,

Screening History

The more you know about your motives, the more you know about the purposes of this kind of writing, the better equipped you will be to move forward with the task of writing your memoir. Your motives may seem self-evidentyou want to recall the things that have happened, the things that have shaped you; you want to make a record of your life so that your children and grandchildren can know you, can know the life you have lived. Or, to be more grand about it all, you want to leave on the world a mark in writing, a testament to who you are, and how you came to be that way.

Robbi Neal expresses her heartfelt expectations for Sunday Best in her poignant Authors Note: I never expected this book to be read by anyone but my children. I started to write because I thought I was going to die and I wanted them to know who I was.

This desire to express who the writer of memoir really is will be examined in detail later, through the example of Margarets Memory Journal.

When writing of oneself one should show no mercy. Yet why at the first attempt to discover ones own truth does all the inner strength seem to melt away in floods of self-pity and tenderness and rising tears?

Georges Bernanos,

The Diary of a Country Priest

Some people suggest that the memoir is a bid for immortality. One of the leitmotifs that plays away beneath the surface of this book you are reading on how to write memoir is that writing can give the illusion of warding off mortality. Just the illusion, mind you. Memoirand fictionare pretty much obsessed with the human response to the idea of time, the passage of time, the meaning of time. I will come back to these obsessions in particular in the sections on Time and Place on page 177 and Self-Portrait on page 301.

People, maybe all peopleI dont knowwant their lives to be noticed, acknowledged, remembered, recorded. I reckon its everybody. (I wonder how monks and hermits and such fit into this generalisation. Abnegation of the self is really the flipside of writing a memoir, in any case, so perhaps that partly explains them.) You, however, want to offer to your readers your unique observations of things, your vision of what life has been like for you. Since birth you have been to so many places in a literal and in a metaphoric and emotional sense that your source of material is actually endless, a bottomless well of ideas and images and thoughts and emotions. And a wonderful thing about writing the story of some of what you know is that the writing will have the effect of expanding the facts. I promise.