You and the person you used to be: This month, Jenny Alexander advises you on how to think of yourself as a character in your life writing
Creative non-fiction takes real life experience and crafts it into stories using all the techniques of fiction, whilst remaining true to the facts. One of the skills of fiction is characterisation, and when you are writing memoir, it helps to think of yourself as a character in the story.
Dani Shapiro, who has written several bestselling memoirs, says she doesn’t write about herself, but about ‘that girl,’ and Natalie Goldberg (Writing Down the Bones) addresses her younger self in her memoir as ‘old friend from far away.’
Thinking of yourself as a character in the story is helpful because it frees you from feeling defensive or embarrassed about revealing some of the things you might have said or done. It’s tempting to portray yourself in a purely positive light, but if you are willing to show your weaknesses, you will come across as a more convincing character – we’re all flawed – and readers will find your story more relatable.
I recently wrote an article about how I came to terms with having to do promotions. I started with an embarrassing story about the week I landed my first agent, when Michael Morpurgo sent me a card saying he was with Gina Pollinger too, and how lovely, we could travel up to London together for meetings and social events. To my lasting shame, I never replied, because I was simply too shy and felt overwhelmed.
My article went on to describe the sorry sequence of talks, interviews and school visits, organised by my publishers and botched by me, before I worked out how to stop running away and start to enjoy doing promotions. I got lots of feedback from authors going through the same kind of struggle, saying that it made them feel less alone.
The scene I remember most vividly in Viv Albertine’s memoir, To Throw Away Unopened, is of herself and her sister arguing furiously across the hospital bed where their mother lay dying. It felt such a brave, honest thing, and will resonate with anyone who has ever felt uncontrollable anger towards a sibling.
This is not to say you necessarily have to include shameful or embarrassing things in your memoir, simply that if you think of yourself as a character, you won’t feel such a strong disinclination to go there if and when the story you are telling would be stronger for it.
The protagonist in your memoir is not the same as you, who are telling the story. They are an earlie
