Ten important things #11
Why do we write memoir? I have no idea, but here are some nice things that happened this week.
My agent recently encouraged me to write fiction. I luckily had a novel up my sleeve, which is about to go out on submission (more on that below), but my passion is still memoir, for so many reasons that I can barely count, and I certainly cannot fit them into ten important things, but I list a few of them here:
Clover Stroud really is the Queen of Memoir
If I had a crown I would place it on her lovely head. She was here in the UK fleetingly a few weeks ago and I was lucky to see her do a talk in affiliation with Hungerford Bookshop. The very talented and brilliant
and the sparky gorgeousness that is came too. The three of us sitting in the front row watching speak of her recently published memoir, The Giant on the Skyline.She writes beautifully, and she is well versed with presenting aspects of her life as ways of helping us understand universals like love and commitment, parenting, our connection to landscape and home - but what really makes her the Queen in my opinion is her voice, her personality which sings from the page. As Mary Karr says:
‘The secret to any voice grows from a writer’s finding a tractor beam of inner truth of psychological conflicts to shine the way.’
And life is full of conflict, the ordinary things of life particularly. Anything emotional or psychological, which is worth noting, is also full of conflict and often ambivalence too. And whether Clover is writing about motherhood or grief, she does this brilliantly.
Are memoirists narcissistic?
Critics of memoir have a lot of ammunition. Apparently, memoirists are vain, narcissistic, too preoccupied with ourselves; that its popularity is a sign of the age of individualism, and psychotherapy gives too much onus to ‘the self’; that we are all caught up in the look-at-me culture of reality TV and Instagram; that curiosity too easily slips into naval-gazing.
I say bullshit.
I will stand in defence of memoir, again and again, as the antidote to narcissism. Memoirists go deep into questions of the human condition - the good ones see things in the round. They expose their messiness, expose their faults. In stark contrast, narcissists are frightened of their true self.