Telling Our Stories By Pictures

Come and join my monthly meet-up tomorrow

A year ago I saw on social media that an old school friend of mine had been diagnosed with cancer. His type of cancer is one that is only found at later stages, and so I was pleased to hear that doctors had caught it early, that he was going to be ok. He has children, including a young baby. Of course he needed to be ok. But he wrote to me last week and told me that he isn’t going to be ok. Not anymore. He will have years he said, but perhaps not many. And so he feels an urgent need to write down his story, for those children to know something of his life, and for him to tell them while he can.

This is something that a lot of people feel, not just when this urgency of life is pressing up against them, but in ordinary time too. We humans are storytellers, it is something innate within us, it is how we connect, how we make sense of the world. Of course it matters when we are facing an ending too, perhaps in some ways it is all that matters.

The last time I saw this old school friend was some 32 years ago. We had probably just come out of our higher maths GCSE exam, it was a hot June day and that night I was going on my first foreign holiday with my cousin. It had been a hot summer, so hot that I had not revised for that higher maths paper, instead a female school friend and I had sat in my back garden and sunbathed, going inside only to watch The Chart Show when the sun had blinded us sufficiently to make our re-entry into the house pitch black. I had recorded the show that weekend, like we all did back then.

This other old school friend of mine – the one who contacted me recently – he wouldn’t have wasted his revision time sunbathing, he wouldn’t have sat like me in that exam and only answered a couple of questions. He’s a smart guy, he went on to do smart things which, I agree, his kids need to know about. He asked for my help to write his memoir, he asked me for resources. I asked him how he felt about writing prose. He told me he could write ‘a mean grant proposal’ but any other type of writing he hadn’t done since we were last in English class together.

I thought about this for a few days, so many people want – need – to tell their stories. There must be some way to make it easier, to construct some kind of ‘paint by numbers’ structure that even someone who is more familiar with texting could follow and find their own life story at the end of it. I have written ten memoirs for other people, I am currently writing one of my own, if anyone could come up with some foolproof method, it surely has to be me, right?

And so I said I would help him. I said he would be helping me by letting him, that I could write a course and he could test it for me in real time, and slowly we would get his life written down for his children.

I think for me, this ‘paint by numbers’ method must involve photographs, and it put me in mind for me a few pieces that I want to share with you, and I want to discuss with you tomorrow night at my monthly meet up.

The first piece is this one for The New Yorker by Annie Ernaux (I’ve given you the link to the unpaywalled version there — sssh, don’t tell).

It is called On Cancer and Desire. The subtitle is Images from a Complicated Year. In it Ernaux describes a time when she felt most alive, right in the middle of a passionate love affair, and yet at the same time she was being treated for breast cancer. At a time when she felt most alive, she didn’t know if she was going to live (although, perhaps, in a strange way, that’s when many people might feel most alive). She peppers the article with photos that she has taken of the carnage left from her lovemaking. Nothing explicit, but clothes strewn on the floor, shoes and tops, belts and a bra, have a look at the piece and you will see.

At one point she writes: One day, M. said to me, “You got cancer only so you could write about it.” I felt that he was right, in a way, but, up until that moment, I’d been unable to come to terms with this. It was only when I started writing about these photos that I was able to do so, as if writing about the photos authorized me to write about the cancer. As if there were a link between the two.

Sometimes writing about something else allows us to write about the thing we really want to. Which puts me in mind of this essay on the braided essay by Lilly Dancyger, which I know I have shared with some of you before at our meet ups.

So in that way I think photographs can be a very useful tool in our writing, and not necessarily for the most obvious reasons.

They say the camera never lies, for example, and yet when I see photographs of myself with my daughter in the first few weeks of her life, I am surprised how happy I appear, how devoted to my child, how relaxed and consumed with love for her I am. And yet I know I was heartbroken then. I know her father had disappeared, I know I had not heard from him for weeks and would not hear from him until after I had gone and registered her birth. In reality I was not relaxed, I was terrified. I was holding my nerve because I was alone and did not know what to do with a newborn baby.

That is the untold story of those photographs, yet going back to them would give me access to those feelings, would give me a way in to writing about that time, in the same way as Annie Ernaux photographing the chaos left by an act that made her feel so alive, helped her to write about how close she was to thoughts of death.

Another piece I want to show you. It is one that I wrote myself here on these pages a year ago. It was based on a course I was taking part in with

Dr Lily Dunn

. We were asked to go back to a childhood photograph with an adult eye. You can read here what I wrote:

So anyway, all this is to say, tomorrow night it is time for my monthly meet up and I would love you to join to discuss this further.

What would make it even better is if you brought some photographs of your own along and perhaps we could write together at our meet up. You won’t need to share your photographs, or even what you write, but perhaps find one of a time in your life when things were difficult. Like the photo of me and my baby, it doesn’t need to be of ‘the thing that was difficult’, just around that time.

Sometimes it is what or who is missing from a photograph that is the most interesting bit. Maybe it is a landscape. Maybe it is a holiday that makes you think of another holiday, one you don’t have photographs of. Maybe it is the day before you received some good news. Maybe it is a photograph of you the day after your life changed in some way. Bring a school photo if you can. Or maybe it is like the photograph of me and my stepfather, that the feeling of his hand in mind could evoke such memories of a place in time and space.

My monthly creative meet ups are available for paid subscribers and I would love to see you there. I will post the zoom details beyond the paywall, so you can upgrade here to access them:

Plus a reminder that I have been working with some people who I have been providing one-to-one mentoring for and if you would like some hand-holding to get your own memoir written, or indeed a work of fiction or other narrative non-fiction, you can find details of my mentoring here:

And so, here come the details for tomorrow night’s zoom, it will be at 7pm GMT Monday March 3. That is 2pm EST/11am PST. I hope to see you there as I think it’ll be an interesting hour spent together discussing these essays and our own work…