Memoir Musings

One of the most interesting things we did on the

Clover Stroud

memoir writing course was to share what memoirs had inspired us and think about different ways of writing about the things we wanted to say. It’s fair to say that nobody needs another: ‘It all started when I was born…’ memoir or an: ‘I got up, brushed my teeth, had cornflakes for breakfast,’ story. Our own lives are too short to be reading that slowly about other people’s day to day doings.

I read a great deal of non-fiction these days and it’s always interesting to see how other authors approach their subject. I love an unconventional memoir. I’m thinking about the brilliant

Ella Risbridger

and her books Midnight Chicken and The Year of Miracles. This leads me to think about Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires and then M.F.K. Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me. I am currently in love with everything Julia Blackburn writes. I just finished reading Old Man Goya. Her books are reverse memoirs. They are always supposed to be about something else, but she can’t help sneaking in and blindsiding you with thoughts of life and death and tiny, bright memories like stars. Laura Cumming writes like that too. Thunderclap, which is about Vermeer but also not, was one of my favourite books of last year.

Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful seems to have a more regular memoir structure until you realise that she has written about a painful divorce by leaving a man sized gap in the narrative, a beautiful analogy for the divorce itself. Octavia Bright’s This Ragged Grace is a peep show of addiction and shifting realities. It reminds us that memory can get slippery. What you write is not always what actually was, but what it was for you. Sometimes it’s about the gap between what you believed then and what you know now. Memoir is not about putting one foot in front of the other, it’s about finding a language that creates a complicated dance between knowing and feeling, fact and emotional truth. You are shifting between what happened, what you want to bury in the past and what you want to take with you into the future. One of the reasons we look so intently at the past is to use it to create a map for our future selves. A kind of emotional GPS, if you will.

One of the things I like best about Clover Stroud’s writing is that it often has a different story weaving through the one you think you’re signing up for. You get double bubble, which gives the narrative a rich generosity I really enjoy. In The Red of My Blood, for example, we get a story of the loss of a beloved sibling and the new paths that navigating grief carves through us, while also journeying on a mythical, grail quest through the landscape of loss. Her latest book, The Giant on the Skyline, has a different kind of quest at its heart. It asks what home is and what home has meant through the generations, through all our familiar ghosts, tracking the way back to ancient man. It looks at myth from a contemporary, human place, without losing any of the awe of our origin stories.

Artistically speaking, the layering of metaphor and story is why I get such a kick out of portraiture. You get to enjoy what the artist has made and who they are depicting. If you know the subject well, it’s always interesting to see how the artist is telling the story of the sitter as well as simply painting their likeness. An example I love is Maggi Hambling’s portrait of the chemist, Dorothy Hodgkin. It’s on permanent display at the National Portrait Gallery if you want to visit it.

When Hambling was interviewed about the painting she said that she went along to meet Hodgkin and was struck by how incredibly active she was, even in advanced old age. Sharp and focussed, she didn’t stop to be posed at rest, so Hambling painted her with multiple pairs of hands, all busily occupied. Each item on the table and shelves is symbolic of something important to Hodgkin’s life and self. It’s a memoir in a single image. It tells you everything you need to know with such beauty and elegance. It’s so clever.

Maybe you can write a painting. Maybe you can create a poem that makes even a single painting look too much. After all, a poem is a writer’s stock cube. Maybe your memoir is a novel, or a symphony or a book about someone else who has held a mirror up to your life. Any creative outlet can be a tool for self expression and it’s up to you how you decide to present and inspire yourself. Find your language, even if it doesn’t have words and use that.