Review of Blake Morrison’s Memoir – Life Writing Lessons from a Professor | Literary criticism

“I“I have lived a life, as I have lived a life as a life writer,” Blake Morrison opens his book Tour the horizon It is arguably the most expansive and expansive literary genre with a flash of its credentials and an implicit call for further investigation. What constitutes life, and what does it mean to write about it? Can you write about yourself from within it?

Before publishing his critically acclaimed best-selling book about his father’s life and death, When Did You Last See Your Father?, in 1993, Morrison lived the life of a poet, critic, and literary editor. And his interest in penetrating the secrets of someone else’s inner world was perhaps already evident: a few years earlier, he had written “The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper,” in which he tried to catch what the press reports on serial killer Peter Sutcliffe had missed (“So the cops asked me questions / Over breakfast, dinner and tea / Until he said: ‘Well, I’ve got it figured out. / Ripper, yes, it’s me.'”).

The poem appears in “In a Memoir,” as an example of how form can be used against the grain of expectations to talk about painful collective experiences; Morrison also points to As If, his exploration of the trial of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, the two 10-year-olds who murdered 2-year-old James Bulger. Writing about life, then, is not always about your own life, and never about your life alone. So how do you do that?

Morrison’s response is a deceptively arranged alphabetical guide, with flashbacks, fodder, and footnotes giving way to character, imagery, plagiarism, and so on. There’s plenty of cheering advice for the would-be memoirist, culled from the author’s years teaching the form at Goldsmiths, University of London: perhaps the simplest example is not to keep repeating everyone’s names, and perhaps the most surprising is not to write off self-publishing if you really want your story published. The book also serves as a great reading list, including titles from Olaudah Equiano’s 1789 autobiography The Intriguing Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, through Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood, Maggie Nelson’s Adventurers, Annie Erno’s work, and most recently Katherine Taylor’s Stirrings, a memoir about growing up that also finds itself prompted by the writings of Peter Sutcliffe. Crimes.

But the most pressing questions seep between the entries, recurring throughout and never resolved. The most important of which is: Does it have to be true? Memory is, after all, a slippery client, and although the contemporary urge to “tell the truth” may appear simply to encourage openness and reject shame, it also draws attention to the fact that others have their own truth as well. When accounts of events and the emotions and conclusions associated with them are challenged, things can quickly get messy.

Should a committed life writer worry about what others think? Morrison hedges his bets a bit: one should be as honest as possible, and certainly not fabricate an entire history in order to deceive and manipulate (see Benjamin Wilkomirski’s invented experiments on the Holocaust). But writers also cannot allow themselves to be seduced by the desire to be loved, or to turn away from painful or embarrassing experiences. You wouldn’t mind too much, either, if your old school friend was dumped because you inaccurately remembered seeing his brother on the train (as happened to Morrison), although you should exercise human decency when you reveal your father’s (also Morrison’s) love affairs.

One of the most interesting results of his AZ approach is that you start adding your own entries. Between admiration and loss, was there no place for solitude, I wondered? Not just as a way to understand why people might want to write about their history, but to understand why so many of us read it? Paying attention to the minute details of another person’s life does not mean befriending them, but can it make one feel – to use another contemporary term – a ‘witness’? Maybe that should be under N for curiosity.