Memories of the Future

Letters of an examined life - letter #4

photo credit: swissmediavision

Writing is about connection. It is about finding those commonalities through shared experience. So when 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 – and 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 will share those unedited – and often very personal – letters with you, our readers.

Lily published Letter #3 on her Substack on Wednesday, and you can catch up with that here – you may like to read it before reading my response.

Memories of the Future

And so… Letter #4

Dear Lily,

Thank you for your letter, for your thoughts, your feelings – particularly for the fact that you so generously worked them out on the page. I too loved the quote from your partner: ‘The individual is the narrative eye but the one who looks through that eye is the dispassionate author.’ But more of that later…

I was thinking first about the man who approached you at the garden party, the one who was not happy with you putting your own life into words. Do you think our writing should come with a warning? Like alcohol adverts: ‘Please drink responsibly’. Or cigarettes: ‘Smoking kills’. Or financial investments: ‘Interest rates can go down as well as up.’

And if they did, what might they say: ‘Warning: Dependent on your life experience – that being everything that has happened to you in the course of your lifetime that has brought you here, to my page, over which I have no control – you may experience a strong emotion when reading, or you may not care for what I say at all. Both responses are equally valid.’

Much of writing is an act of control, or rather many acts of control, if we are writing memoir we sift through our experiences, we are first and foremost the editor before we have even written a word because we decide what will and won’t make it to the page. Isn’t it strange that people think of editing as the thing that comes at the end, especially when those choices in themselves require a level of honesty, or perhaps dishonesty?

There are more decisions to be made: whether our sentences and paragraphs will be long or short to describe what has happened to us; and then of course we pick each word, we change them, we pick again. We put a full stop – no a comma – no a full stop. Definitely.

A book is made of a thousands tiny decisions and each one is individual to us. Someone else could tell the same story and make a thousand tiny different decisions – that would result in a different book.

But once we’ve made those decisions, once we’ve agonised over that control, we let it go. It’s a strange dichotomy isn’t it? The control it takes to write and then the loss of control necessary to publish. I’ve never actually thought of it like that before I wrote it down. That’s the beauty of these letters, I’m not only writing to you, but me.

And I have no control over how you might receive this letter, I send it with no idea of what thoughts might be aroused in you. You are responsible for arranging my words into some order that resonates with you. You may misread, misunderstand or interpret them entirely different. We could fall out, or this sharing of our words could bring us closer. This is the risk of communicating with another human, but the alternative is not to communicate at all. Is that what that man at the garden party would have preferred? Your silence altogether?

What I’m saying to you is that our jobs as writers is to put the words down in some order to help the reader see whether what we are saying seems truthful, or at least an honest recollection. The reason we like being writers is because we nudge closer to that truth in our practice and yet it always alludes us in some way. And so we try again. We are constantly trying to get closer to some truth. Some, is the key word. Not The Truth.

Could our readers see that? Could there be a warning at the top of our writing: What you are about to read is some truth about my life and the experiences I’ve had in it. Some. Not all. Please read accordingly.

Although I don’t think that would have put the man at the garden party at ease as he didn’t want you to write at all.

Perhaps there is something definitive to people about words pinned to the page, as if the act of committing things to black and white make them absolute. Don’t they remember that black and white make grey?

Does an artist paint to make something look exactly like the object they have in their mind’s eye, or their interpretation of it? If the artist paints a purple apple no-one calls him a liar because they’re usually green. Are we more generous with artists who use paint than we are with those who use words?

We have no control over how others (including our ex husbands or family members) may perceive our words in the same way an artist doesn’t. Does the artist get upset if you see a small aubergine when he painted an apple? I doubt it.

I don’t think we are writing to convince people of something, we’re writing to know ourselves better, and therefore – as you mentioned of the greater experience received by your reader – they get to know themselves better. I saw both my own father and my daughter’s father in your depiction of your father. I am reading your book with all the life experience that brought me to your page.

I have written in the past about my marriage and people ask me how my ex reacted. I turn to the words of Nora Ephron who wrote a new foreword in the reprint of her brilliant novel (or rather work of autofiction) Heartburn, because they always make me smile. If you haven’t read it it is based on the time when her husband had an affair and left her while she was pregnant.

“Everyone always asks, Was he mad at you for writing the book? and I have to say, Yes, yes, he was. He still is. It is one of the most fascinating things to me about the whole episode: he cheated on me, and then got to behave as if he was the one who had been wronged because I wrote about it! I mean, it’s not as if I wasn’t a writer. It’s not as if I hadn’t often written about myself. I’d even written about him. What did he think was going to happen? That I would take a vow of silence for the first time in my life?”

But to turn to your partner’s quote about the dispassionate author because you asked me what I thought of it. Can we ever be dispassionate when we are battle scarred? I believe there is a key to seeking that higher ground from which we can not only see clearly the plains beneath us but also the horizon, because that’s what gives us perspective – this wider view. When we write from here we are not writing in anger, bitterness, or brittleness, but with compassion with softness and flexibility in our thinking. How long it takes for us to reach this peak, we cannot estimate. Some of us will never get there, we may stay stuck in time or our determination and dedication to a narrative that does us no favours – our victimhood maybe. But I believe there is one word that offers us an answer to this idea of becoming the dispassionate author: Time. For me, this small word is the key to writing.

And dispassion does not mean unfeeling. I remember sitting in front of a therapist once and listing everything my ex had done, running out of fingers as I did. The therapist said I sounded like I was reading from a shopping list. This is not dispassion this is desensitisation because just under the surface the wounds are still open. This is not a helpful place from which to write for others.

As a memoirist you know how vital time is to writing, time is where we start from, it offers us structure, but how do we know it is time? Is it simply the story persisting as you say, or is there some way of knowing deep inside that we have recovered enough to tackle something with that compassion, softness and flexibility I mentioned above? Do you too think reaching this higher ground is vital to the process, and how do we know that we have reached this stage and that it is time to begin?

Sending all my good wishes to you as we tackle these important questions together,

With love your pen pal.

Anna

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