Life writ large
By Ángel Gurría-Quintana writing about writers' memoirs

in the Financial Times , April 11 2009

Chronicled. Do the crumbs from writers’ tables make as compelling reading as they might have us believe? Pictured: ‘The Writer Sculpture’ by Giancarlo Neri, in situ at Parliament Hill Fields on Hampstead Heath in the summer of 2005

Making an Elephant: Writing from Within

By Graham Swift

Picador £18.99, 402 pages

Writing in the Dark: Essays on Literature and Politics

By David Grossman. Translated by Jessica Cohen

Bloomsbury £14.99 132 pages

Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession

by Anne Rice

Chatto & Windus £16.99 245 pages

The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws

By Margaret Drabble

Atlantic £18.99 350 pages

Once Upon a Hill: Love in Troubled Times

By Glenn Patterson

Bloomsbury £14.99 240 pages

In a lecture at Cambridge University in 2000, novelist Margaret Atwood revealed that she has a sign that hangs on her studio wall which reads: “Wanting to meet a writer because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.”

This is a useful lesson to bear in mind as readers around the world gear up for the literary festival season. It reminds us that disappointment may await anyone who, having enjoyed a novel, hopes that meeting the author will be enjoyable too. It is also worth remembering this idea when confronted by that increasingly ubiquitous thing – the writer’s memoir.

As a genre, the novelist’s memoir has been much maligned. This may be partly due to a spate of purposefully fraudulent “misery memoirs”, such as James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003).

More recently, works perceived as trespassing on other people’s privacy have been in the news – notably Julie Myerson’s The Lost Child, published last month.
But perhaps it is the genre’s very ubiquity that makes it suspect. Immersed in a celebrity-driven culture, readers seem to be as interested in the author’s personal circumstances as in the writer’s work itself. Yet they are also aware that in spite of its omnipresence, all autobiography is tinted by quirks of memory and subjectivity.

What, then, is the value of the writer’s memoir? A recent crop of autobiographical volumes by well established novelists suggests that the answer to this question is contingent on the answer to another question – value for whom?

For readers, a writer’s memoir has the advantage of creating intimacy – or the illusion of intimacy – with an author. “This book may have several things to say about writing and writers, but I hope it offers a glimpse or two into my life – a writer’s life or just my life,” says Graham Swift in Making an Elephant. Though this is more a collection of essays with autobiographical overtones, rather than a memoir, Swift’s book will enthral anyone who enjoyed novels such as his 1996 Man Booker Prize winner, Last Orders.

Swift’s essays display the same quiet intensity as his fiction, a capacity for subtle storytelling with dark emotional undercurrents. His dislike for media-driven attention is apparent. “There’s no real reason why a book, which is full of words, should require any other spokesman than itself,” he argues. One of his dislikes is a common supposition that all fiction is autobiographical, “that novels must be about what actually happened to the author”.
As a writer, Swift is adamant that the author and the person are separate entities. As a reader, however, he seems no different to the average book lover. In an essay on the Russian writer Isaac Babel he gushes: “I’ve admired and been excited by many writers, but very few indeed have given me the feeling ... that not only would I have liked to meet them, but [that], had we met, we would almost certainly have got on.”

Despite protesting that a writer’s fiction is not “disguised autobiography”, Swift’s essay on the importance of place in literature reveals how central his personal experience has been in recreating the South London geography intrinsic to many of his novels.

In Writing in the Dark, Israeli novelist David Grossman is less coy about the link between an author’s experience and their work. The book is a compilation of literary essays and political speeches, infused with deeply personal reminiscences. In the title piece, he quotes the Italian author Natalia Ginzburg as saying that: “Our personal happiness or unhappiness, our ‘terrestrial’ condition, is of great importance for the things we write.”

Read the full interesting piece at FT.com.