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MEMOIR \u2013 or creative non-fiction \u2013 is enjoying a\u00a0gathering popularity among contemporary readers. Why should that be? Because everyone loves a personal story, powerfully told.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
MEMOIR \u2013 or creative non-fiction \u2013 is enjoying a\u00a0gathering popularity among contemporary readers. Why should that be? Because everyone loves a personal story, powerfully told.<\/p>\n
Despite the old-fashioned tinge of the word itself \u2013 \u2018memoir\u2019 \u2013 this form offers great imaginative possibilities to writers. Less constraining than straightforward autobiography, yet holding within it the power of a real-life experience, memoir can draw us into the world of another, in a unique, and often deeply poetic way.<\/p>\n
Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter, a magical re-imagining of Ted Hughes\u2019\u00a0Crow, which explores the pain of childhood loss, and\u00a0H is for Hawk\u00a0by Helen Macdonald \u2013 an intense narrative of her relationship with a bird of prey, in the wake of her beloved father\u2019s death, are two stunning, and completely different, examples of the genre. Both these books describe a visceral and transforming relationship with the natural world: they show how nature, in all its raw power and vitality, can revive us, when we are at our lowest ebb. Trees, plants, animals and birds, sea, sky and earth \u2013 the very world around us \u2013 can make us well again, in body and mind.<\/p>\n
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Seven years ago, I wrote a memoir called\u00a0Old Dog.\u00a0Like Porter and Macdonald, my inspiration came from the animal world. Not birds this time \u2013 but dogs. And one particular rescue dog, who came into my own family, and proceeded to \u201crescue\u201d the\u00a0beleaguered humans she lived among: gracefully, tenderly, and with huge canine spirit. My subject was the dog herself, called Muffin. My subtext was grief, bereavement and loss. How do we find strength when illness and death come calling? How to find beauty in an ugly situation? In this case, it was an ordinary little dog who shone the way.<\/p>\n
Creative non-fiction, much like the novel or short story, resonates best when it is focused around a powerful event. A birth, a death, a life-changing moment. It comes to life when it hones in on a particular relationship \u2013 like that of Macdonald and her hawk, or me and my beloved old dog \u2013 and explores that relationship in a searching and honest way. The atmosphere of the world described is all important. Sensory and precise descriptions of scenes and places \u2013 inside the room of a house, or out in a particular wild place \u2013 can make a memoir come fully alive in people\u2019s minds, making an impression \u2013 an emotional mark \u2013 that never completely fades away.<\/p>\n
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Old Dog\u00a0is due to be re-published soon, and I find myself re-reading the original and adding contemporary material, reflecting on the recurrence of themes touched on in the book. What I learn from this process is that life is cyclical. Themes and experiences emerge again and again. Constantly we re-invent and rediscover ourselves, as we tread through the sometimes difficult pathways of our lives. In the final paragraph of\u00a0Old Dog,\u00a0written not long after her death, I imagined her running beside me, on one of our familiar walks. She seemed very present, very alive. \u201cAnd that, for me,\u201d I wrote, \u201cis where she will be now, like the puff of a dandelion\u2019s head seeded lightly in the breeze: dancing, somewhere in the undergrowth and over the bumpy dirt tracks of this simple little wood. On, on and on. Forever.\u201d<\/p>\n
Memoir may touch on deep and even searing experiences \u2013 as Maggie O\u2019Farrell\u2019s recent, astonishing account of her many brushes with death,\u00a0I Am, I Am, I Am,\u00a0goes to prove \u2013 but to reach the reader, it must also be robust, vibrant, even jubilant. This is, after all, a human need: to see some light – to revel in it, even if that light comes from a very dark place.<\/p>\n
Recently, I have taken to walking those woods again, after a long absence. The bluebells are about to bloom. My memories are sharpened. The dog, somehow, still alongside me. Those words still carry truth. They are rooted in reality, are intimate and personal \u2013 yet tap into something elemental, even universal. The things we love, never leave us. Not if we hold them in our minds. Not if we write about them, clearly, honestly, from the heart.<\/p>\n