Autobiography of an Inanimate Object

This month at our meet up, we're going to have a go at writing one

A still from Autobiografia di una Borsetta

I’m sure I’ve spoken to you about Joanna Hogg before, she is my favourite director, and oh yes, I wrote about her back in January in a list of film recommendations for you:

And so imagine my surprise this week when I happened upon a new short film by her, and it was this that prompted a theme for our monthly Write with Me Club.

Our meet-up usually takes place on the first Monday of the month, but this month, I’m going to need to move it to Sunday because I will have four French teenagers in my house on Monday night for a foreign exchange trip. So, that means our meet up will take place on Sunday, April 6th at 7pm BST, (that’s 2pm ET and 11am PT — I think, I’m a little unsure with daylight savings so please do check).

If you haven’t come to one of my meet ups before, do try to make it. They are for paid subscribers and we’ve built a lovely community and it’s just a nice way to spend an hour, chatting with me and everyone else, talking about some creative stuff and doing a bit of writing – it’s all very casual. If you’re not already a paid subscriber to White Ink, you can upgrade here to join us:

Anyway, back to Joanna Hogg. She is a British director and her first feature film, Unrelated, remains one of my favourites. What I love about her is her realism, so much so that she mostly casts friends in her roles rather than trained actors (though do bear in mind that her friends include Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston), and she abandons hefty scripts in favour of allowing her ‘actors’ to ad lib. If you haven’t seen one of her films than do check them out, she is mostly known for her semi-autobiographical, Souvenir films, which are also brilliant.

What I discovered at the weekend is that Miu Miu commissioned her to create a short film for them and her creation, which I’ve posted below is called Autobiografia di una Borsetta — Autobiography of a Handbag.

Miu Miu has been commissioning these short films biannually by female directors for the last 15 years, and this year they asked Joanna Hogg, her film is #29. The brief is extensive, to use something from the latest Miu Miu collection to explore femininity in its widest sense. Joanna Hogg is actually the first British filmmaker who has been asked to make a film for the fashion brand and I not only watched the film and loved it, but also watched a couple of interviews she had done about how she came up with the idea and put it together.

It is, in brief, what the title says, the autobiography of a handbag, and she was inspired to create this film by two books, a short 19th century novel called Autobiography of a Pocket-Handkerchief, and a relatively new book called The Prop, exploring the role of props in cinema.

“This friend had written this very academic book about the prop and it just made me think how in films sometimes we’re concentrating on an object, or an object is in the background, and how it interested me to put an object in the foreground of a story and for the people to be seen in the background…” she said.

I thought this turning on the head of the narrative was a good way that we could perhaps think about our own work, in some one-to-one mentoring I’ve been doing recently I was chatting to a writer about their own work, and how inserting a braid in as a kind of wild card narrative strand can often lift our work, providing a different point of view or even a breather from a heavy text (that might be heavy emotionally, or with research). So using an inanimate object can work in two ways, firstly it might provide a whole or short story in itself (plenty of writers have used them in novels) or it might also enhance a non-fiction story that already exists, but what thinking about storytelling in this way will definitely do is expand your mind, and that’s always a good thing.

Here’s a little more of what Joanna Hogg had to say about coming up with the idea of this film:

“I didn’t want to exactly humanise the handbag in a way because it is this inanimate object, but I decided to have the handbag tell its life story, so the handbag has its voice ….and it talk[s] about what it has witnessed in its life,” she explains. “I also made the decision [about] what is exactly the visual perspective of the handbag ….how does the handbag see, and I thought well, the handbag sees the world like an insect, an insect can see all around, so it’s got a very different perspective from a human… and then of course like we witness our own lives and we think of our memories, the handbag in remembering its life – because we start the story with the handbag thinking back over it’s life – would have an objective view of its life, so you don’t just see it subjectively from its point of view, you see what it remembers of certain situations of its life.”

There is a lot here for us to unpick, firstly the choosing of the inanimate object, Joanna Hogg chose Miu Miu’s Wonder bag because she felt it was both iconic and symbolic from a feminist point of view, but then giving life to an inanimate object forces us to ask certain other things of it: How does it see? How does it speak? What might it have witnessed? And how does this impact on the object itself? Is it possible for it to have an emotional reaction? And suddenly we look around at inanimate objects that have borne witness to our own lives, or perhaps have had other lives before they arrived in our own, and we wonder what their stories are? What might they feel about that if they were able to? How might their view differ from our own? And how might thinking like this – of something so different to much of our regular writing – help unlock more of our creativity?

There are some great interviews on YouTube with Joanna Hogg if you would like to know more about the making of this film, including the fact that she shot the entire thing herself using only iPhone 16s. She found this was also helpful from a creative point of view because it enhanced her storytelling, for example an iPhone is small enough to show us a view from inside the handbag.

I really think you should watch this short film yourself, and see if it inspires you. It is only 23 minutes long, and so if you are planning on attending my Write With Me Club on Sunday I recommend you do as we’ll be discussing it as well as opening our minds to find the stories contained within our own inanimate objects.

For example, if you were writing about the end of a marriage, what object might have borne witness to some of what went on? Or what object might help you tell the story of a difficult childhood and how might it have witnessed what you went through? Would your stories align? There are so many places we could go with this type of storytelling, and even if you’re not writing at the moment, you still might want to come along for some creative play. It’s a nice way to spend an hour.

And so, remember, this month we’re meeting on Sunday not Monday, as always I’ll send out the zoom details to paid subscribers on the day, and if you are not already upgraded, you can do so here:

And do watch the film and share your thoughts in the comments. I’d love to know what you think, and don’t forget to then have a think about which inanimate objects you might like to give life to in story, and we’ll have a go together on Sunday. I’m looking forward to it!

Here’s the film…