on reading memoir

On living a life, on writing memoir

‘Bits of my life fell off into it,’ – his book Lessons, said Ian McEwan in the interview ‘how to describe a life'.

Lessons is not an autobiography but is memoir fiction, writing and living a life in the only way possible. It defies a simplistic plot structure whilst also being the truest way a story can unfold; amongst its own undulations, obscuring in its tangles. Perhaps then, it the most true a fictional story can be.

In Lessons, Roland’s life unfolds in these undulations as all lives do.

We ask the author ‘How do we describe a life?’ and we are asking ‘How do we live a life?’
What have we left unfinished and suspended thinking we were still living it? How do we bare this?

Memoir looks at life happening inside itself, observing it from without. The tangled layers and lessons jostling at once, the protagonist, but only in this story, no singular antagonist, no one lesson or clear mountain climbed and reaped view.

There is no plot in life, we are not promised redemption from our struggles.

But laying out a life like this, admitting ‘this is how it was’ means these animate happenings, still surely alive and happening somewhere, are suddenly committed page, solidified as artefact both metaphorically and physically.

They are no longer malleable or lived in, simply lived, and this happening in constant succession.
The happening is already The Happened. In memory there is only the present and we are fooled. However visceral everything is, this is the retelling. Our unresearched first attempt becomes our first and final draft

Aptly named ‘Lessons’ but never referenced as lessons, Roland grapples with the times he is not gentle with his heart, the recklessness of youth, his unrealised formative experiences, the people met who betrayed him, the grief, death, all inescapable.

The things that completely veer life from its plot, yet, vital to the only plot there was ever going to be.

‘What would I do, were this to do again’?  is the question Bosola asks at the end of The Dutchess of Malfi when suddenly his momentary actions become what he has done, become his life.

This question would surely haunt the writer of the memoir, and the liver of a life.

You can write the past and live there, but you cannot change a thing.