Small presses and the subscription publisher Unbound have widened the field.
The outlets for publishing memoirs have diversified too. And it doesn’t have to be cradle-to-grave: a slice of life, or collage of fragments, can be enough. You don’t have to be famous to write a memoir. And the genre has reinvented itself to take diverse forms: lyric essay, creative non-fiction, confessional prose-poem and so on. What was once a geriatric, self-satisfied genre – politicians, generals and film stars looking back fondly on long careers – is now open to anyone with a story to tell. In Elizabeth’s Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton, the writing tutor Sarah says: “If you find yourself protecting anyone as you write … remember this: you’re not doing it right.”Įveryone has a book in them, it’s said, but as Martin Amis noted in his memoir Experience(2000), what everyone seems to have in them “is not a novel but a memoir … We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the CV, the cri de coeur.” Democracy itself may be under threat but the democratisation of the memoir keeps advancing. In mid-flow, you need the illusion of privacy, not to be anticipating people’s reactions (which are in any case unpredictable).
You can worry about other people later, when you’re editing. Either way, when writing about your own life, it’s important to get the monkeys off your shoulder – to be uninhibited by the possible fallout of your words. S ome memoirists send drafts of their work to loved ones, or even not-so-loved ones, and where there’s a response alter their writing as a result.
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