Ethics Of Memoir: Candia McWilliam, AS Byatt

The Guardian:

Memoirists are vampires and thieves, you might say: vampires and thieves with shards of ice in their hearts. However much McWilliam may want us to think about her story in terms of the sentences, of course we are also interested in the sense. In a prurient (or perhaps hope-filled) desire to read about how a famous novelist hit the bottle and rock bottom and then somehow got her life together again. Yes, of course that's a deliberately clichéd version of her story and an unfair reflection of McWilliam's rich writing. But it would be naïve to suggest the book won't be read for that narrative.

Read the whole story: The Guardian

Comments

[Lev Raphael]

06:33 AM on 08/25/2010

L.P.Hartley's "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there" couldn't apply better than to memoir. Working on a new one myself, I asked my brother about a traumatic accident in our family that took place when I was three years old. We had completely different memories of what happened. I didn't remember him as being there at all, and he didn't remember my role in what happened. Each of us had a narrative in which we were the leading actor. And a third layer of memory was added by how my mother talked about what happened..... No wonder there are family disputes and even lawsuits about memoirs.