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Interview: Damian Barr on writing Maggie & Me

Interview: Damian Barr on writing Maggie & Me

In advance of the publication of Into Being, about the transformative power of memoir, I am sharing the interviews that I did as part of my research ... this is the third

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Dr Lily Dunn
Jun 15, 2025
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Interview: Damian Barr on writing Maggie & Me
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Damian Barr and Diana Athill at The Charleston Farmhouse

In this series of interviews, I will be talking to memoirists, both published and working towards publication, about their writing process, and how writing memoir has helped them better understand themselves and their place in the world. I am also interested in how a writer navigates difficult territory for themselves and those they love. These interviews have been crucial research for INTO BEING: The Radical Craft of Memoir and its Power to Transform (published by MUP on October 7th),

Damian Barr’s memoir Maggie & Me is about growing up in a small town in Scotland, working class, a broken home, and coming into his homosexuality during Margaret Thatcher’s reign. It’s full of humour, tragedy and compassion, and is one of the best memoirs I’ve read at capturing the child’s voice and experience. A stunning memoir that has as much resonance today as it did when it was first published.

Damian Barr is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. Maggie & Me won Stonewall Writer of the Year and Sunday Times Memoir of the Year. Damian is currently adapting it for stage. His debut novel, You Will Be Safe Here, was a BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime and a Book of the Year in the Observer, Guardian and Mail. He is working on his next novel now for Canongate Books. He’s written columns for The Times and The Sunday Times and hosted series for BBC Radio 4 including Guide Books and Whose Truth Is it Anyway? In 2019, Damian brought books back to television with the BBC’s Big Scottish Book Club, now in its fifth series. His now legendary Literary Salon ran from 2008-2023, transforming the cultural conversation. Damian holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Lancaster University and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He is a trustee of Gladstone’s Library and a campaigner for libraries. Born in Scotland, he now lives in Brighton. You can find out more about Damian here: www.damianbarr.com

Was it clear to you that Maggie & Me was a memoir? Or did you think of writing it as a novel?

That book is ten years old now and the landscape for publishing memoir has changed dramatically. There is more appetite for memoir, but also the conversation around what it does both for the writer and the reader has opened up. I was a journalist and I knew I wanted to write a book, and had thought initially I would write a novel rather than a memoir, simply because I didn’t think memoirs were for people like me. I thought they were for people who were older, richer, straight, powerful, or who believed they had some kind of legacy to impart or a message to communicate, and that wasn’t me.

One of my very first events was with Janice Galloway and she asked, where are the gay Scottish writers? It was very hard to point to them. I didn’t know any. Certainly, they weren’t, at that point, on any curriculum. Although I had been taught them—Edwin Morgan, for example. But never told he was gay. Of course, there were others, but they perhaps hadn’t been published very well or had been forced to be in the closet. And so, it was really scary to go out into the public and say: I am writing a memoir about myself and my life and a big bit of that is being Scottish, and a big bit is being gay, and a big bit is being working class, and a big is bit about abuse and neglect, and – I’m not saying I am this pioneering person. I’m not. But it is also true to say there weren’t loads of memoirs to draw upon – for me to say it’s a bit like this or a bit like that. And in the time since then – a really short space of time – there are so many more stories being told. It’s a very different thing for me now to write another memoir, than it was to attempt that first memoir.

What’s the role of craft in your memoir writing?

I paid a lot of attention to my craft and wanted Maggie & Me to stand alone as a work of literature that could be interrogated on its own terms. One early reader said I needed to think of myself as the central character. But when people review memoir, they are often lazy as they’re looking at what has happened, not how we render or remember what has happened, not the craft involved in that. Or the emotional labour, and the unique costs and benefits when you take it out into the world. There is of course as much of me in my novel as there is in my memoir, but I have that shield of fiction. So, there are things that happened to me or things that I did as a young person that I did not want to put into Maggie and Me, which I directly put into my novel. In both books, I am exploring the same themes, but there were also those things I wanted to keep secret. As an artist, you choose the form according to what it is you want it to do. When I pitched Maggie & Me publishers made offers for me to write it as a novel, but I wanted to tell the truth – and be seen to be telling the truth – because I was told so often as a child nobody would believe me, and I should be ashamed. So, for me the act of telling and witnessing my own life was reparative. It was also retraumatising but ultimately it was reparative. The writer of memoir puts themselves on the line in a way that the novelist doesn’t or can’t – the form demands it. Writing my novel took five years and it was exhausting and emotionally taxing and I had to make myself vulnerable to do it, but I was not vulnerable in the same way that the memoirist is.

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I see writing memoir as a gift in a way. Firstly, a writer is doing the hard work to try to understand something that is complex, going deep into their subject. But they’re also standing beside their story and saying this is my truth. Do you think memoir is an important form for people who have not felt they have had a voice?

I really struggled to allow myself to write my story because it’s tempting to think, oh it’s transcription. It all happened, I just have to get it all on the page. But it’s not that, and it’s not transcription and it’s not about remembering. I do talk a lot about reliving, but when you realise that in the writing of it you have to go through what you’ve gone through in life again – and you have to volunteer to do it – it is very hard. I also realised things about myself I wasn’t proud of, or felt I wish I hadn’t done, and I found myself wishing I’d been a better person. It was very confronting. It’s obvious when you read a memoir when a writer is avoiding something or withholding a part of themselves. I think that can be interesting if it’s done consciously. But I didn’t want to do that.

I found it hard, but I had to do it for my younger self and for myself in the future too. I had a strong sense I did not want my future to be the future of people I’d grown up with. I sensed that if I took control somehow of my past, I could change my future. And I do think I did that, but not necessarily in the way I thought I was going to. I could only do it because I had a partner who was supporting me emotionally, I was in therapy, I had a supportive agent, Clare Conville, and an editor, Gilly Beth Stern, who was there for me. But at the same time my publisher didn’t say to me you should think about going into therapy – there was no real duty of care. I just happened to get lucky with some amazing individuals at Bloomsbury. You need to have a really good support network because it’s going to take more from you in the short term than it’s going to give back.

All writing is hard, but writing memoir can leave you feeling like you have no external layer of skin. It can leave you feeling very raw. I don’t think it should be painful. I’m not one of those people who requires trauma to be performed on the page, but you need to know what you’re getting into, and I didn’t know. Because I was writing from my child self, I spent a lot of time not being in the present. So, with my next memoir, I’m preparing myself for what the impact will be on me in terms of process. I have a better network now than I did, but I am also much more aware of memoir as a form, and the trips, pitfalls, tropes and expectations. And there is, if I’m lucky, a reader who didn’t exist for me before. We are told our experience is our horizon, but I like to think of it as the foundation on which we stand to see other horizons.

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Writing Maggie & Me, did you go through a process to find your voice, or was it always there?

It was a process, and it was very hard and the hardest part of the book. In fact, Diana Athill said to me she was told by her great grandmother you are not the only pebble on the beach, and I thought – here is this lady in her country house and here is me in my council house being given the same message. I really struggled. I tried all sorts of things. Early drafts were angry, and then I tried to be funny as a distraction. I tried first person, third person, past, present tense. All over the shop.

How did you land on the voice? Did it come from confidence?

No, I had no confidence at all. I kept trying to tell other people’s stories, like my mum’s or my sister’s, but I realised it was ventriloquism. I could only really account for what I felt at that time in that moment. Once I settled on the first person and realised I was reliving and not remembering, and realised I could be in the present tense, and trust that, the voice started to work. But I also told myself the story didn’t need to be there immediately. If I open your mouth and look in your throat what would I see, what is bubbling up, waiting to come out? If I turn you upside down and shake you, what will fall out? That’s what you need to go to first – once you see what all that is, you can ask is there a story here – is there an arc that connects these things? Then you’re telling the story. Editing is hard: it’s hard to be brutal when you’re editing your own life.

So interesting what you say about what is there in your throat, bubbling up, because it’s often this that you circle – because it’s the thing that makes you feel most exposed. My students find every subject to focus on expect that thing, and a lot of the mentoring I do is to help them get closer and closer to that subject. I find this interesting, because it’s almost like mentoring memoir is similar to therapy in that you have to build up that trust and a safe space, and allow and give others permission to write what they want to write about.

Giving yourself permission is a good way to see it. There is an expression I use when I teach. I call it self-privileging. It’s the sense that nobody is ever going to give you a permission slip. The people in your life who have harmed you or those you have loved are not going to turn around and say ‘yes please do write about your life.’ You have to accept it’s a transgressive act and always potentially a selfish act, so you have to give yourself that permission. And I think as I said before some people find that easy because they’re born with that permission but most people aren’t and they have to work really hard for it.

On the subject of asking other people’s permission, how did you navigate that with your family?

It was scary to turn down the offers for a novel. It was temping, but I knew I wanted to be wholly truthful and write it as memoir. Maggie & Me was bought on a partial, via auction. When I knew it was going to be real, I got cold feet. I was worried that those who thought they knew me would think I lied to them. But I wanted to talk to my family about it, my mum and dad and my sister particularly. My parents aren’t literary at all, they aren’t in my world – but they love me and want me to be happy. Neither of my parents have read my memoir. My sister has. I gave it to my sister and gave her permission to change things and she didn’t change anything. I shared it with my best friend, Heather in the book, and she only chose a different name for herself. But what’s been interesting is seeing how the book has given a life to people. My friend Mark, who I lost for instance. People now know him; he has a sort of life that he doesn’t have literally anymore. When my mum came to readings in the past, people couldn’t believe she was a real person, because they’d viewed her as a kind of celebrity. So, people have been pleased. They’ve been generous. It wasn’t their choice. There are wider family members that I’m not in contact with but not because of the book and I don’t know what they think of it. But there haven’t been any dramas at the Christmas table – (I’m not really from a family who has a Christmas table!).

The book is still finding a life. I just did an event at the Edinburgh Book Festival with Catherine Taylor for her book The Stirrings. The first question I was asked brought me to tears. Memoir isn’t about putting something away in a box. It’s open ended – it’s super amplifying and opening up your past to lots of people. I did hundreds of events and it left me feeling very vulnerable – I had to stop doing events for a couple of years because it wasn’t just the reliving on the page, it was also the reliving on stage. For the audience, it’s a night out, they buy a ticket and ask a question – I know this from my Salon and from going to events as a reader. But you as writer have to go home and try to get to sleep, and that’s hard.

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I guess you learned your parameters, you learned something about yourself.

I’m still learning.

That’s interesting in itself, a transformative experience. You learn from writing it and reliving it, and then performing it.

Yes, at every stage you’re learning something new about yourself – it can be a mirror held up to you. I was worried that I’d included a scene where I attempted to strangle my stepfather and no one has ever commented on that, never said anything about it, but to me it was shocking. But what I’ve learned is you can never predict what people are going to think or how they’re going to respond to particular passages in the book. Then there are these odd throwaway comments that they become obsessed by. I do think that’s interesting.

How do you think memoir is different from lived experience?

Lived experience is what happened, it’s the plot. Memoir is what you make of that and how you communicate it. It’s the story. It’s the Vivian Gornick, Situation and the Story. Lived experience is what happened, memoir is what it means.

Does writing memoir demand a certain distance?

That’s an interesting question. Yes, but also no. I think writing a memoir can help you make sense of an experience while you’re in it. A good example is Alexandra Heminsley – Somebody to Love. In this brilliant memoir she processes her experiences around fertility and her partner’s questions about gender seemingly in real time. I’m aways concerned for people when they do that. I think it can offer a reader something, but I would be careful about publication. I think Alexandra’s memoir is an example of it working, but there are other examples where it doesn’t work.

Memoir is communal as a form. I was able to write my memoir because Janice Galloway wrote her memoir and Diane Athill wrote her memoir. We’re all helping each other. You can’t know who you’ve liberated and inspired. Every memoirist is chipping away at that edifice of silence and shame, we are all helping each other as writers and readers to do that.

If you write memoir or are interested in memoir, you get so much from a paid subscription: live zoom workshops; craft essays, original interviews with published writers, a chance to see early proof copies of INTO BEING, a wonderful supportive community. Come and join my community of memoir lovers. I look forward to getting to know you.

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