Recently I have been reading memoirs, in preparation for a workshop I was booked to give.
The breadth of style and topic this form inspires is astonishing. Narrative, letters, diaries, blogs...how can I compare Paris in Love, Eloisa James' light-hearted account of her year in Paris, with Joan Didion's stark contemplation of ageing in Blue Nights?
Childhood, too, can be mined by the memoir writer. Has any writer surpassed the naturalist Gerald Durrell's delightful Corfu trilogy? In My Family and Other Animals, he takes us to an idyllic summer roaming the Greek Island, free to explore the landscape's hills and bays with his dog, Roger.
I closed all these books, feeling privileged to have shared these lives with their pleasures, fears and discoveries.
The day of the workshop arrived. It was intended for senior citizens, and the faces gazing back at me showed, like my own, the passage of time. Having agreed that, unlike autobiography, you can write as many memoirs as you choose, the class each shared a random topic for the coming exercises. Some spoke out fluently. Others hesitated. A couple of people waved me away as if to say, "I'm not ready."
I noticed the transforming effect of each person's words. Faces became youthful, shedding decades as they relived moments of emotion. For our feelings seem to be the key to what we most vividly remember.
Nostalgia, pride, regret, even fear was sketched. Smiles and laughter chopped through the barriers of strangers. It was as though, sharing memories that mattered, we were like Hansel and Gretel, tiptoeing through life's unknown forest, our trail of experience scattering a path we could look back on. Memoir is a wonderful medium. Who is your favourite author of memoir?
