Memories of the Future

Letters of an examined life — Letter #9

Writing is about connection. It is about finding those commonalities through shared experience. So when

Dr Lily Dunn

and I discovered each other’s work we both thought: ‘now this is a woman I could sit down and chat with for hours over a bottle of wine’. Yet geography – the miles between us – made that impossible. So instead we committed to writing letters to one another, to discuss life, memoir, writing craft and more. And in this series, Memories of the Future: letters of an examined life, we have shared those unedited – and often very personal – letters with you, our readers.

For new subscribers, a catch-up, we started this letter-writing series in January and ran for four weeks, eight letters passing between us on a range of topics from motherhood to memoir and the ethics of writing about our personal lives, and how that is both felt by us and received by others.

You can find Lily’s first letter to me here, and follow the series of eight letters that went between us.

Memories of the Future

Though if you are new to our substacks, it is not necessary to catch up to follow our thoughts. You can’t start right here with our new short series starting today.

And so to Letter #9…

Dear Lily

It has been a while since we last wrote, hasn’t it? Back then, in February, it felt like we were still in the depths of winter, the wind still had that icy chill and the ground was covered in snowdrops, but now, firmly into spring, even the last of the daffodils are making way for the summer.

I feel bad writing now because I know this week you are away, that you have carved out some time to work on edits for your novel. I am really excited for you, not only that you have resurrected this project which I believe has been sitting, tucked away in a drawer for a while, but that you have escaped for a whole week to concentrate on your writing, to be absorbed in that world. What a luxury.

I wondered if we might write something to each other about fiction, particularly when our stock-in-trade as life writers is stone cold fact. I listened to an interview between the writer Damian Barr and Brett Anderson, the frontman of the band Suede, a few weeks ago. Anderson was talking about how memoirists can be inaccurate by what they leave out of their work, which can be seen as ‘lies’ and yet a fantasy novel, which is all ‘lies’, reveals truth about the human condition. ‘There is truth in fiction and fiction in truth,’ he said.

I started writing books ten years ago, and in that time I have written nine, or perhaps ten memoirs – I always lose count and need to use my fingers to remember them one by one. There is a safety net for me in fact, in memoir – this washing line of life that we pin our laundry to. Editors don’t ask so many questions, I’ve noticed, they don’t say: ‘That character wouldn’t do that… wouldn’t it be better if she did this…’ when you’re writing something that did actually happen. They accept it, first drafts fly through to line edit stages. And yet fiction, it is a different kind of beast. For seven years that I was writing a novel, The Imposter, I was also writing memoirs for other people. I needed to keep picking it up and putting it down as I bought myself time to write and I did that through my day job, as a ghostwriter of memoir. But the other reason it took me so long was because I kept pausing, scratching my head and wondering – is anyone really going to believe this?

I wonder if it was harder for me, a person who has been accountable to facts through my work as a journalist and as a ghostwriter? You might scoff to think that journalists are accountable to fact (I know I do more and more these days) but we are certainly accountable to defamation lawyers and managing editors, so contrary to popular opinion, we don’t make things up that we write in newspapers. And yet fiction was completely different, it was without boundary, without a safety net. On the one hand, my imagination was not constrained by fact, but on the other hand it made me feel lost not to be. Do you feel that when you write fiction? Do you feel free, or so completely different to when you write memoir?

I swore when I finally finished that first novel, that I would never write another – or maybe it was the disappointment of the publication process that instilled that in me, how ‘my baby’ became a product, just like any other. I said I would rather give birth again than write another novel, and yet… there must be a literary equivalent of those hormones that kick in a few months after you have experienced the horrors of childbirth (in my case at least) that make you long to do it all over again.

I decided for my second novel – which is still a work in progress – that I would instill some boundaries to make myself feel safer. I decided to set my characters in a real place, in Turkey, where I lived in my twenties. I wrote it in the spring of 2021 when we were still trapped at home by rules that no longer made any good sense, and I longed to escape and so I did through my writing. From my kitchen table, I travelled back to Turkey, a place where I had been so happy, where I had longed for nothing but the sun on my back and a salty sea to cool off my feet. I also set my characters among people who had once existed, the Istanbul intelligentsia, writers and poets and artists who chartered sponge diving boats in the Sixties and discovered the ‘blue voyage’ cruises around the Aegean coastline which are now so popular with tourists.

My protagonists were, of course, completely fictional (as was the story I had created for them), but I had given them a safety net of something real too, a lifebuoy to cling onto, and I wrote in a frenzy, completely absorbed in this other world that I had created to the exclusion of all others, even the one I inhabited myself. For me, that is the thing about writing fiction, that you create this world and you need to live in it, if only in your head for the time you are writing (both on and off the page), and any time that you are called to break the surface of the water and return to the life that you are living: to conversations with your friends; or requests from children to make a snack; or a day job of writing for others, you feel deeply resentful. It feels like you are being torn away, and any time you spend in this apparent ‘real world’ is just treading water to get back to the other. Or at least that is how I feel.

That is why I envy you now, editing away in solitude. Tell me, does any of what I have described resonate with you? Do you need to inhabit this other world you are creating with the same obsessiveness I feel? Do you understand what I mean about the difficulties of ‘making something up’ when you are used to writing fact? Do you feel unsafe, unboundaried in the same way I did?

I would love to know, and I hope you’ll forgive me for interrupting your flow…

With all love and happiness to be reunited again through our letters,

Your penpal,

Anna

If you have enjoyed reading this, please consider upgrading to become a paid White Ink member, it really does mean a lot to me and there are lots of benefits for you too, like hanging out with me at my kitchen table on zoom once a month and discussing various aspects of writing craft and life (this month’s theme was ‘place’), a whole archive of more than 25 guest author essays on writing craft, plus dozens of essays like this one on my life, too. And, as you can see below, White Ink is a Substack Featured Publication 2024 so it’s worth it for just a few pounds a month.