Into Being: a book about the magic of writing and its power to transform

In the age of Trump, Elon Musk, technology, and AI, INTO BEING reminds us what it is to be human

I have written a book about something I am really passionate about - literary memoir, true stories told well, and how those stories can help transform a person’s relationship with the original experience that inspired the story, which most likely has been following them around for years, tugging on a sleeve, asking to be better understood. It will be published by Manchester University Press in October, this year. What I explore in this book is how writing and, specifically ‘crafting’, memoir - moving through various stages of separation from that original experience by re-drafting, editing, refining – helps a writer transcend the difficult feelings that they might have been victim to all those years. By doing so, it also has the power to change a writer’s relationship with loved ones, and also change the minds of their readership.

But Into Being also leans very much towards the alchemical power of writing, and how magical it is, how in many ways it is inexplicable, its process - overwhelmingly intuitive, difficult to pin down or formulate. Every writer is aware of that point when the writing takes over, and the story develops its own momentum. However much you as writer like to plan and structure in advance, the writing at some point will bump you off course and remind you who is in charge. And it is only when you trust it and follow it, that it surprises you, coming alive on the page.

In an age of social media, filled with random confessions, re-inventions and distortions of the self, the question of what it means to be an individual, the essential self, is more urgent than ever. In short, this is a book about the depths we are capable of reaching through the process of writing memoir, by committing to the long haul: sitting with difficult experience, even if it is uncomfortable, stopping, looking, digging up its roots, giving it light and oxygen. While the story I have to tell is uniquely mine, so bound up with my voice, my perspective, my view of the world, what I choose to see, what I choose to read, who I choose to speak to, by going deeply into that experience, I also touch on the universals of experience, the archetypes that reach beyond just a single flesh to thousands of other people’s experiences, millions, even. There is no formula for that. No piece of software, no AI programme, no robot.

Then we begin to have a greater understanding not just of ourselves but of the world and the human condition, what Virginia Woolf calls ‘the real thing behind appearances’. And which essayist and critic Phillip Lopate writes is ‘the underlying shape of experience… not purely subjective, but which wait[s] patiently to be brought to the surface.’ An artist becomes a cipher, a medium, for the greater business of meaning making. ‘The whole world is a work of art; that we are part of the work of art,’ writes Woolf. By writing memoir, we tap into this latent wisdom.

This takes the memoirist beyond simply finding words to tell a personal story; it takes us into the realm of philosophy and metaphysics; the artist as ‘truth-sayer’ (in as much as there is one guiding truth). Do you see how important writing is? How the personal goes so far beyond a single skin?

The manuscript is about to go out to early early early readers for quotes, and we will have proof copies in June. I am going to be sharing special peeks into the pages of Into Being with my paid subscribers over the coming months, and I might even share some proof copies! There will be competitions to take part in, discussions had, and lots and lots of opportunity for learning more about the special and magical craft of memoir, and how to write it well. It is my passion, after all.

To give you a taster, this is what memoirist Marina Benjamin has to say about Into Being: 'A beautiful book: absorbing, propulsive, generous and humane, both in its honesty and in its willingness to share process.' Marina Benjamin, author of The Middlepause: On Turning Fifty

If the book appeals to you, I would LOVE it if you pre-order a copy. As you might or might not know, when authors get pre orders the bookshops are more likely to pay attention to a book, because it has proved it has a readership. So every pre-order helps. You can order straight from my publisher, Manchester University Press , to avoid going through Amazon.

And have a lovely Sunday!