Interview: Marina Benjamin on writing A Little Give

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 fifth

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. I will be using these interviews as research for my upcoming publication, INTO BEING: The Radical Craft of Memoir and its Power to Transform (published on 7th October)

My fifth interviewee is Marina Benjamin, whose most recent book A Little Give is a moving and necessary account of the relationship women have with care, what we term ‘women’s work’, both within the family and beyond. As with all Marina’s memoirs it asks difficult and probing questions about everyday life, and in this case, the unspoken and often invisible tasks of a woman’s day. By asking questions, Marina helps us asks difficult questions of ourselves. And every word placed on the page is considered and beautiful.

Marina Benjamin’s books include the family memoir, Last Days in Babylon. Her subsequent memoirs, The Middlepause and Insomnia have been translated into nine languages. Her essays have appeared in the Paris Review, the New York Times, Granta and Aeon, where she works as a senior editor. Her latest memoir A Little Give out now, completing her midlife trilogy.

How did you land on your idea?

Most of my ideas emerge out of me cannibalising my own life and experiences. I’ll be troubled by something I don’t understand, or that won’t leave me alone, and until I give it full critical attention, I cannot lay it to rest. That said, I also think that there’s a bit of magic involved in getting the idea that won’t be forced. It requires you to be open to impulse, random experiences and left-field thinking; to romance and terror; to being swept-up or knocked-down by something. It requires not knowing, if you like. So for me there’s a delicate balance between having an idea and not knowing it completely, because if you did, there’d be no motivation to probe and explore and discover something new to you. One challenge I sometimes have is that of recognising a good idea when it comes along. Or in my case, not dismissing an idea too quickly. This is a constant struggle for me since I find it quite easy to run from a good idea – which more accurately is to run from myself, because having a good idea is scary. It demands far more work and commitment that you sometimes feel it is in you to give. At least, that is my unhealthy dynamic with book-birthing!

Did it feel essential for you to explore this subject? Was it urgent? Persistent?

I can’t write a book without feeling that it is absolutely essential. It has to feel urgent and necessary so that I’m not just intellectually engaged but emotionally engaged. Passionate even. I’m not sure how else I’d stay the course. Also, you can sense the quality of urgency in someone’s writing, a driving force that gives the writing more zip and pizzaz, and that can lead you to write at speed, and with the right amount carelessness.

With students, I talk about there being a ‘commitment threshold’ and how it needs to be crossed before a book takes on a momentum or life of its own that you get inescapably caught up in. And then there is no choice but to proceed because the book won’t let you go.

What is it about memoir that appeals to you?

I love the way that memoir embraces contradiction and narrative disruption and personal discomfort, and refusing to tie up all the ends. It throws all this stuff down and then demands you craft that irresolution into something possessing aesthetic integrity. For me, this fundamental difficulty is a large part of the air that memoir breathes. It shuns neatness and easy answers.

It’s also a very elastic form. Memoir lends itself to experiment in the same way that novels do, since there’s no right way to tell a story. In some ways memoir is even more elastic because it doesn’t need to be believable – and I think that novels do. Many memoirs strain credibility not because their content is outlandish but because people’s behaviour is often extraordinary: irrational, self-damaging and/or violent, looping and insistent, dissembling or sublimating, etc.

I’m also drawn to the way memoir allows the writer’s consciousness to be naked on the page, for their puzzlement and curiosity and questions and troubles to become a driver of narrative. Readers want to be involved, to exercise their own curiosity and empathy, and it’s easier for that to happen when a writer offers them a clear way in. By expressing doubt or puzzlement, asking questions and exposing your own dilemmas, you extend an invitation to the reader to join you in the pondering. Sometimes arriving at a good question is the point of memoir.

Did your voice come naturally, and your authority as the person telling this story, or was that something you needed to work on – did it come more easily the deeper you went into your research?

Voice is a very tricky thing. Because it is at one and the same time deeply authentic and also deeply performative. For me, I need to find the authentic voice first, and that’s the harder task because we’re so self-conscious when we write! – and self-consciousness is antithetical to the quest for authenticity. My way round this is to try to write behind my own back. I generally open ‘low temperature’ files, where I’ll free write on something, and the utterly private nature of this writing can be way to circle around and perhaps even arrive at some ‘truthful’ renderings. By truthful here, I’m not talking about what is factually true, or even what is faithful to memory, I’m talking about truthful writing, by which I mean intimate, transparent, open. And by transparent, incidentally, I mean self-aware absent of self-regard.

I generally find that ‘voice’ is something that takes shape over time; so yes, the deeper into any given book project the more ‘true’ the voice.

And how did you navigate writing about family members or those who are close to you?

Writing about family is a perennially thorny problem. And different writers will have different comfort levels when it comes to doing so. In A Little Give, I questioned my father’s sexuality, which is something I’d never have done in print while he was alive; I’ve also written for Granta about his violence towards me as a child – again, not a subject I’d have dared to broach before he died, but that reticence in me arose more out of a hangover of fear and a habit of self-silencing which remained with me even after he died – and which, of course, are the very things memoir is so good at confronting.

In spite of the permission I’ve taken in various works where I’ve written about my father, I’m not sure I subscribe to the idea that a dead family member is fair game; after all, they can’t defend their privacy, or fight back against potential libel. So, I think that what you write about a deceased family member needs to be handled with a sense of responsibility. That said, a large part of the impulse to write memoir is the pursuit of emotional honesty, and that pursuit can lead you into painful reckonings with painful truths about family members. One of my own ‘rules’ for writing about family is that I apply the same techniques of exposure in equal measure to myself: if I’m going to scrutinse a family member or take them to task, then I must put myself through the very same hoops and with the same merciless rigour. That was how I approached writing about the precarious compact of care that pertains between me and my elderly mother. If I portray her being selfish or mean, then I need to show me being resentful and careless, or unkind. We have to come off looking equally bad in order to read as equally human.

Did you share the text with relevant people before it went to press? Did you give them veto as to what was kept?

I’ve shared work in the past when writing about my child, and I’ve shown work to my husband who’s often a foil in my memoir writing. But I don’t think that sharing your work in this way is necessary. And I certainly don’t believe in giving family members any kind of veto. In fact, I prefer to put the responsibility for what gets into print on the writer’s shoulders. I think it’s my/their job to exercise due diligence when it comes to writing about others, to listen to any cavil family members may entertain. My/their job to make the judgement call on what can be said (see above) and what can’t. I suspect other writers won’t agree with me on this, but it’s my long-considered take.

Did you write a proposal for this book, or did you write it in its entirety first? Did you sell it on proposal or the entire manuscript?

I sold my latest book when I was half way through writing it, and then rather wished I’d waited until it was done because this book took a long time to find its form. It really only came together in a second round of thorough-going re-writes. So the book I sold was not as good as the book I ended up with.

More generally, I don’t like writing proposals because they are fake marketing documents that, in my case, usually bear little, or at least insufficient resemblance to the finished book. In the past when I have gone to the (huge) trouble of writing proposals, I’ve always felt afterwards that I over-delivered: that the quality of the final ms exceeded what I proposed to do, and that I under-sold myself (and my book) by taking it to market too soon. Then again, it is a huge ask of a writer to write a whole book for free, essentially to spend years writing before it even gets a sniff of the market. Plus, the risk you take of it not selling is so much bigger. For me, this dilemma – when to sell? – is a real double bind.

Were there aspects of your story that you resisted, that you thought you could get away with not writing, but then realised it wasn’t possible – and if so, how did you protect yourself, or how did it feel to write those sections?

Absolutely, there were things I resisted: places I was reluctant to go. But my feeling is that the best work happens at the point of resistance, and that when you feel you’ve arrived at a limit or barrier or blocking point, your job is to push past it – so as to ‘feel the burn’ (to quote the inimitable Jane Fonda!) Deborah Levy read my memoir Insomnia in ms, and wasn’t convinced that I’d pushed myself far enough in places in terms of emotional honesty. She correctly surmised that there were things I didn’t want to write/reveal. We then had an interesting conversation about that, about how it is possible to reveal and conceal things at the same time; to write about the symptoms of something, say, when you can’t directly address the something. Or your feelings around the something, while nudging the reader to read between the lines.

Do you think personal narrative is a platform for exploring the unspeakable? Lifting the veil? Or even the unthinkable? If so, please expand:

Oh, this is a terrific question. I think one of the chief purposes of memoir writing is to confront the darkness inside of us all. I am personally deeply drawn towards the unspeakable and the ugly. I want to think and write about people (including myself) thinking ugly thoughts and behaving badly. Because it’s only really interesting when people act against their best interests, or self-sabotage, or say one thing and do another, or strain another person’s kindness or trust; or subvert agreed understandings or expectations. Or when they are driven by ego, or even more interestingly by id. Isn’t this when our interest is piqued? I’m talking about ordinary everyday failures or character flaws as much as anything else, although I also think that family members do awful things to one another, (behind the protective shield of the nuclear unit and the privacy that society affords it), and that sometimes these things are unspeakable. People frequently inflict themselves upon others or overstep boundaries in dreadful ways; they invade personal space, traduce the basic rights of an individual; this seems to me to constitute the unthinkable, not because we can’t imagine such things but because we believe that it costs too much to tear down cultural and psychic institutions such as ‘the family’. So we prop them up, against our own deeper knowledge of how things work –– about which we pretend we know nothing.

How is memoir different from lived experience?

They are ontologically separate. Memoir takes place after the fact. It is how a writer gives meaning to their lived experience, re-shaping it as they give it substance on the page.

Do you journal and if so, how did that help when it came to writing your memoir?

I don’t journal but I do open dozens of files in which to free write, so that I can write behind me own back (cf my response to your question about voice).

Does writing memoir offer cohesion to otherwise fractured memories and experience, and is that cohesion empowering? If so, expand on why?

Writing memoir can offer cohesion, and that, in turn, can set a writer’s mind to rest (perhaps that’s what you mean by empowering?) But I worry that such rest is illusory. Or, more accurately, that it represents a kind of home goal. I’m more interested in the way that memoir can embrace fracture and discordance, open-endedness and contradiction. I like loose ends. Perhaps that’s why I try hard to resist ‘resolution’ in my own work. When I read novels, for example, I’m after a resolution of some kind or I don’t feel satisfied: I want the novel to give me plausible and resonant emotional experience. But it’s the other way round for me with memoir. I am suspicious of resolution and I feel dissatisfied when a memoir aims for an ‘emotional wrap’. I prefer iterative endings, where what happened is set against what might have happened, or what one wishes would have happened, or what, in an ideal world, should have happened, etc. Or non-endings, where you’re just left with a pile of unanswered questions – but at least you’ve arrived at the questions. One of my favourite James Baldwin mantras is: ‘the job of a writer is to lay bare the questions behind the answers’. Pure gold.

When we write memoir, we make something that is otherwise in flux concrete – this can be good and bad, good in that you might become a master of your story, and bad perhaps in that it sets it in stone and it becomes a reality, rather than something that was fleeting or forgotten. What are your views on this?

This is a fascinating quandary for all writers working with memory or factual material. If you tell a story well enough, it eclipses or usurps other tellings. It becomes ‘what happened’ as opposed to ‘your version of what happened at the moment of looking back’. The written version – as you seem to be suggesting – can also give undue weight to small fleeting things. It can amplify them out of true proportion. But then, things that seem fleeting or inconsequential can often achieve great weight, symbolic and real, when they are understood inside a bigger picture, or approached on the slant. I also believe that the things we want to forget, or that we try to forget, are the very things it is important to examine. What’s the point of writing from life, if you can’t raid the unconscious: the place we put what we’d rather not look at?

In Middlepause and your essay ‘More Primitive, More Sensual, More Obscene’, you wrote about the importance of writing from within the body, promoting a kind of embodied writing, and quoting from Virginia Woolf about the importance of finding a new more sensual language for illness or changes in the body. Do you actively explore this in your writing, and if so how do you go about it? Is there a process that helps you enter into this embodied state?

So much of the way we think is embodied. How we react to and process experience – the visceral impact of it – the way we process emotions, to how we navigate the physical world. We live inside this weird Cartesian illusion in Western cultures where we kid ourselves that the perceiving subject, the ‘I’, is all mind. As if the part of us that has thoughts were separate from the meat of ourselves. But I just don’t buy that severing of mind and body, anymore. There’s a political undertone to that, of course, since rejecting that dualism is a cornerstone of the Feminist project, given the way mind and body are so deeply and historically gendered. In terms of writing memoir, however, I think that an atunement to bodily feeling and knowing is a form of enrichment. The body gives us a whole range of concepts to work with, demands a new language, insists on there being a material component to memory or knowledge or feeling. And if you read Merleau-Ponty and his modern day successors who write about ‘affordances’, it insists as well on there being a material element to perception and agency. Often, too, what the body knows pulls in an entirely different direction to what the mind believes, which means that tuning in to embodied knowledge immediately gives you a dynamic tension. For any writer that’s extremely useful.