Why Ever Did I Want to Write

‘Why am I writing this autobiography of sorts, this collection of stories about myself, this patchwork of a life? I’m no celebrity, and I’ve done nothing of importance in or with my life (other than bring up three amazing boys), nothing that would warrant public attention, promotion or explanation. But I am a writer, and writing has been such a consistent thread running through my life and how I’ve lived it that I feel this gives me purpose in putting together a collection of autobiographical swatches, to show this interweaving of living and writing. Much of my writing has been so-called ‘life writing’, for I’ve kept a lively diary from the age of 11, but much has been other forms of writing, journalism in particular. I’ve also written novels, plays, short stories, poems, local history, psychogeography, and children’s fiction. I am not society’s idea of a ‘writer’, a published author with a portfolio of commercial or literary books behind me. No, I am my own idea of what a writer is: someone who enjoys the process of writing, the translating of thoughts and ideas into communicable language; someone for whom writing infuses their daily life; and someone whose mind and soul is affected - infected even - by how and what they write, and by the need to use words to explain, to expose, to imagine, and to play.’

These are the opening paragraphs in a new memoir, focusing on my own life from birth to my mid-30s. Just published by Pikle Publishing, I’ve called it Why Ever Did I Want to Write. Back in the 19th century, biography and autobiography was dominated by the so-called ‘Life and Letters’ approach, whereby a chronological narrative of a person’s life was patched together with a dense collection of extracts from diaries and letters. This methodology was severely criticised in the first half of the 20th century by the like of Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf. Strachey wrote of Victorian biography: ‘These two fat volumes, with which it is our custom to celebrate the dead ... are as familiar as the cortège of the undertaker and wear the same air of slow, funereal barbarism.’ And Woolf wrote of it as an ‘amorphous mass’ in which ‘we go seeking disconsolately for voice or laughter, for curse or anger, for any trace that this fossil was once a living man.’ (See my essay in A Companion to Literary Biography edited by Richard Bradford at Googlebooks; also the introduction to the essay can be found here in The Diary Review.)

Why Ever Did I Want to Write can, however, be seen as a modern form of the ‘Life and Letters’ approach, in which extracts from my diaries (and to a lesser extent letters) do provide a crucial source of information (not available in any other form - especially not from my deficient memory). However, this modern form of the genre differs markedly - at least in my book - from the old in at least three ways. Firstly, rather than following a dry chronological order, the memoir is divided up into themes, some focused on people/relationships (my grandfather, mother of my first child for example), some on places (Hampstead, Brazil etc.), and others on specific topics (travelling, work, photography). Secondly, the diary extracts have been chosen not so much for factual biographical purposes, but for their colour, emotion, or movement. Thirdly - as indicated by the title - the writing is infused with modern self-analytical tendencies, a determination to understand how and why my life turned out as it did.

Here is the promotional blurb.

‘Many of the chapters are underpinned by entries from my diaries - not great writing, but characteristic of me all the same. Unlike those who burn/shred their childhood diaries for containing embarrassing detail or youthful journals for being impoverished in a literary sense, I’m a fan of my own diaries from every stage of my life. Generally, I consider them a reliable witness, for I have mostly tried hard to be straightforward and honest with myself - what would have been the point in leaving behind unreliable accounts of who or what I was? Obviously and self-evidently I have often – chronically, indeed - argued the case for myself when it comes to friction, disputes, arguments with the world around me. We all engage in this kind of self-justification, and without it most of us would be utterly lost psychologically. I have always claimed to myself, and occasionally to others, that the act of writing down the internal dialogues about external difficulties has helped keep me balanced. After all, I need to make what I write down in black and white sound sensible, I need my self-justifications to work in written language. It’s when they don’t work very well, and I find myself writing long convoluted explanations, that I sense myself out of sync, and, if not lying to myself, then twisting evidence.

My early diaries are desperately bare of the kind of detail that would interest me today, but nevertheless they are an invaluable source of information - through their content and the manner of the writing - as to who I was.

Which brings me to the topic of memory. For most people, their memories serve as the primary source of information about their past. Not so for me. I remember almost nothing about my pre-teenage years, and very little about my teenage years. The memories I do have are fixed stories about (or pictures of) myself: when brought to mind I cannot root around for further detail. Therefore, as I’ve long told myself and friends, my diary is my memory. A good example of this is the journal I kept for three years while travelling round the world: almost all of what I think I know about myself during that time can, in fact, be found in the journal. Over the years, I’ve had occasion to re-read it several times - typing it onto the computer, editing it for a printed copy, editing it for uploading to my website and so on. This means that if any of the travelling stories in my memory get altered (exaggerated), re-reading the diary serves to reset them.’

Why Ever Did I Want to Write can be purchased as a paperback or ebook online at Amazon.