Spotlight on the Reader with Kate Bateman - Workshop 2 (Memoirs and the novel)

Kate Bateman is a teacher, reviewer and seminar facilitator. She has given workshops at a variety of book club festivals in Wexford, Dublin and most recently at Ennis. As part of our 'Spotlight on the Reader' series Kate examined a variety of literary genres, focusing on works by authors participating this year's Mountains to Sea dlr Book Festival.

 Workshop 2 - Memoirs and the novel - Notes

You may wonder why Selina Guinness’s, The Crocodile by the Door and Julia O’Faolain’s Trespassers were chosen? I know Julia O’Faolain had to cancel, but because I thought I should include memoir-writing in a workshop I decided to use the contrast the works provided. Memoirs use the same literary devises as fiction, as do biographies but without the research apparatus of footnotes, indices and bibliography. Memoirs are a kind of fiction – both select material about characters (real and imagined).

It is well-known in the trade that “True Stories” sell best, and that “life writing” has exercised English departments and review sections of the broadsheets for some time. It’s a portmanteau genre which includes confessions, letters, journals, diaries, oral narratives, even court records... Novels like The Gamal and the The Fields are memoir-novels which arguably were born out of the MODERNIST idea of breaking down conventions ... Think of what James Joyce did to the novel form with his day-in-the-life-a-Dublin-Jew novel.

But where does this leave us when we read Julia O’Faolain’s Trespassers classified by herself as “A Memoir” ? And, Selina Guinness’s Crocodile by the Door as, “A Story of a House a Farm, and a Family”? Does it matter whether a MEMOIR is verifiably truthful? ... Probably, yes ... John Mc Gahern’s Memoir, his story of growing up in County Leitrim, reads as the truth of what happened when his mother died and his father, a very vain, cruel, wayward man, controlled the family ...We believe it to be truthful because, I suggest, Mc Gahern’s fiction and the writing style of the memoir is all of a piece ... Another work with the ring of authenticity, is Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark ... a tragic-comic story of growing up in Derry ... fastened down with actual dates but written within as a mystery, who-dun-it. It even has the young Deane with a sibling on the cover ... Yet he and the publisher insist it is a fiction. Henry James called the nineteenth-century novel “a baggy monster” but the memoir/autobiography is at least as baggy and it has a longer history. When Augustine of Hippo wrote the Confessions there was already long been a tradition of biographies of accomplished men, among them —Plutarch’s Lives, written at the end of the first century A.D. Several epochs later, Rousseau’s Confessions were more about escapades and wrong-doing (the stealing of a ribbon and foisting the blame on another) than focusing on God. Later we get the slave narrative, the

Holocaust survivors’ stories and the “I slept with  . . .” memoirs. In 2009 a cause celebre occurred in the US when Oprah Winfrey and her staff of well-paid reader-advisors, were, it is argued, badly and publicly duped. James Frey’s literary sensation, A Million Little Pieces, rocketed to No 1 on the New York Times best seller list after HER book-club hyped its message of redemption for drug addicts. His publisher described it as a “memoir” ... “fiercely honest and deeply affecting ... one of the most graphic and immediate books ever written about addiction and recovery” Frey’s defence on the Larry King Show was that he merely “embellished” the incidents. “It’s a memoir”, he added ... “It’s an imperfect animal ... I don’t think it should be held up and scrutinised the way a perfect non-fiction documentary would be ... or a newspaper article.”

On the other side of the argument, Kathryn Hughes of the Observer referred to the memoir as ... “Pieces of prose that once would have been sent out into the world as novels, have more recently been packaged as the Story of Me”. She cites Lorna Sage’s bestseller, Bad Blood, to my mind, terrific work, about growing up in an impoverished parsonage in Wales, as model.

And among the questions we might ask are:

§         What is the purpose of the ‘true life’/memoir – to explain, justify, entertain??

§         Does the work have direct appeal to some audiences more than another? appeal for certain a

§         As a story, is it more powerful than a fiction?

§         What choices have the authors made when shaping the life-story ...

§         How is the passage of time presented?

§         Does your perception of the writer affect your experience of the book ... (Mc Gahern’s Memoir is useful here)?

§         What is Are there benefits and drawbacks ... when an author shares an intimate view of their life?

Both Guinness and O’Faolain memoirs certainly have appeal for readers who know or knew something of the writers and their families. But because they are both heirs to hefty social, political and intellectual inheritances their memoirs have not just interest, but perhaps significance? Selina Guinness is clear that her family tree is a distant branch only of the famous brand; nonetheless her story is a twenty-first century version of the ‘ Irish big house’ and its struggles. Julia O’Faolain’s story is fashioned out of Ireland’s intellectual sector as it struggled against the narrow-minded, repressive religious and political authorities of post War of Independence Ireland. Both writers have a tale to tell that explains, justifies a little and engages readers.  

O’Faolain’s chapter headings, all but three, contain place names: Protestant Killiney, My First Summer in France, Paris and the Council of Europe & Portland Oregon. But this is a thoughtful, memory-driven book, not a travelogue; there is a strong sense when reading it of being within the writer’s mind-set. Note the title – Trespassers  

The Crocodile by the Door

Belinda Mc Keon in a truncated (by me) review says:

Guinness spent her teenage years here (Tibradden) in the care of her uncle and grandmother. In 2004, this time joined by her husband, she is once again living with her uncle when he becomes ill and dies. Not before he . . . shut off all disordered rooms, also shut out disordered situations; Guinness now faces the consequences of his well-meaning denial, especially when it comes to the farm's elderly stewards, Joe and Susie Kirwan, who inhabit its gate lodge with their disabled son.
The Crocodile by the Door . . . is a surprisingly entertaining primer on the travails of farming today, from ungovernable sheep to unfathomable bureaucracy; a fascinating glimpse of what had become of the Anglo-Irish by the late 20th century and into the 21st; an elegant modern pastoral and, at the same time, an astute dismantling of that genre; and a meditation on the meaning of labour, and on how hard work shapes identity as well as achievement.
The changes Guinness must now make are necessary not just for the survival of the farm, but for the protection of the Kirwans, who have long lived in a kind of furtive squalor. Guinness is discomfited to find that she cannot address this situation without looking, to the Kirwans and to others in the locality, like a harsh landlord of the ascendancy class to which she, however distantly, belongs – class divisions cannot be chatted away.
Early on in the book, a flashback to a girlhood moment by the fire cannot but evoke Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September, and there is something of Lois Farquar even about the adult Guinness: the niece of the house, caught between worlds, learning that politics are always personal. There is no way, however, around the irony of Guinness, from within an old Anglo-Irish estate, looking with distaste on the colonisation of a country by the builders and developers who consider themselves its new ascendancy. She does not deny this irony – but nor does she force it. Out of the complexities of attachment, and out of a knowledge, hard-won, of what true dereliction is, Guinness has written a remarkable book.