'MEMOIRS ARE our modern fairy tales – the harrowing fables of the Brothers Grimm re-imagined from the perspective of the plucky child who has, against all odds, evaded the fate of being chopped up, cooked, and served to the family for dinner." So wrote the novelist Francine Prose in the New York Timesin 2005, in an effort to explain the seemingly inexorable rise of memoir as a genre.
Irene Graham agrees. For 20 years, Graham, a Dublin woman now based in Galway, has been running creative-writing workshops, retreats and courses, helping people from all walks of life to get started. Five years ago, intrigued by the growing popularity of memoir, Graham began teaching memoir-writing workshops, and this month launched an online memoir-writing course, TheMemoirWritingClub.com.
So why are we so fascinated by memoir? Some people have linked the genre’s current popularity to Freud, Jung and the growth of interest in individual psychology – the current craze for memoir began at the end of the 20th century, also known, let’s not forget, as the Century of the Self.
“Well, memoir has been around a long time, since the 4th century, when St Augustine published his life story,” says Graham. “But it definitely is exploding at the moment. Memoir is really a blend of autobiography and personal essay. It focuses on a particular experience or challenge, or a series of experiences or challenges, and the decisions people did or did not make as a result. And I think we are more open now to listening to other people’s stories and hearing how they handled their challenges. Maybe we’ve had those experiences ourselves, or similar ones, and so we are interested to know how others got through them.”
Not that she is a fan of what has come to be known as the misery memoir, and she is well aware that not all accounts of trauma should be published.
“There are four main reasons why people come to my classes,” she says. “One is to write their life story for family and friends. Another is to write it for publication, if they have a story worth publishing. A third is that fiction writers come to learn memoir writing in order to evoke life experiences that they can then translate into fiction. And the fourth reason is to use it as a therapeutic process to relieve trauma.”
Keeping a journal and writing memoir is now recognised as a helpful part of the therapeutic process. Research carried out by the American psychologist James Pennebaker and others has found that people who write about meaningful or traumatic events not only feel better emotionally but also improve their physical health, immune function, hormonal activity and other biological markers of stress or disease.
“If people are writing for therapeutic purposes I encourage them to turn off their self-edit, to really get into it and allow their writing voice to be angry or vengeful or the voice of a victim, whatever they feel,” says Graham. “But it’s for personal use, not for sharing. It may be that they do it with a counsellor for support.
“When a person is writing as a part of therapy, the writing voice is completely different from the one used when writing for publication or for family and friends. One of the basic things about writing a memoir to share is that you write in a voice that has wisdom and hindsight. That’s not to say you can’t include a really traumatic experience or experiences – of course you can, but you have to be able to handle it properly.
“I remember, in one workshop I gave, a woman was writing about the most horrific abuse she had suffered – blood and guts everywhere, so to speak – but she was able to communicate in such a beautiful way, she had such a beautiful writing voice that you just wanted to read and read and find out how she coped with this awful cruelty. Mind you, this woman had done a lot of work on herself and so she was at a point where she was able to go back to that place and be calm and non-judgmental in writing about it.”
She cites Jeanette Walls's brilliant memoir, The Glass Castle, as an example of how to chronicle a traumatic childhood without self-pity but without minimising the lingering effects either.
And what of books such as James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, the American bestseller that supposedly documented the writer's period as a drug addict? There was a media scandal when it was revealed that major parts of the book were either exaggerated or untrue.
“I think that when a writer describes a piece of work as a memoir, then he or she is entering into an unspoken contract with the reader that what they are writing is the truth as they experienced it,” says Graham. “It may not be the same version of events that someone else would give, but it is the truth as you see it. That’s not to say that you can’t change the odd unimportant detail or change a timeframe a bit, but only if it doesn’t undermine the overall truth of the experience.”
Graham is endlessly enthusiastic about people’s capacity for creativity. A photographer and writer, she worked in the film industry in Ireland before moving to Los Angeles in the 1980s, studying writing on the UCLA extension programme. While there, she became fascinated by the complementary methods of education that were gaining ground on the West Coast at the time, which included left-brain/right-brain techniques.
“There was a real buzz about the new discoveries about how people think and learn, and how our brains work,” she says.
She spent time at the model schools, which were using the new methods, and she studied in particular the work of the developmental psychologist Howard Gardner, whose work includes writings on the theory of multiple intelligences and the uniqueness of cognitive learning. “At first, it was primarily a personal interest,” she says. “ I found with my own education that in primary school I was very creative and eager to learn and stimulated, but in secondary school that all disappeared. It was like I had entered a dark cave. For years I couldn’t figure out what had happened, but when I learned about right-brain/left-brain learning, I suddenly understood.”
Back home in Ireland in 1991, Graham decided to use what she had learned, using creative writing as a model, and she founded the Creative Writer’s Workshop.
Over more than two decades she has taught fledgling writers from the US, Australia, Germany, France, Canada, Egypt, Hungary, Spain and Ireland. She still teaches fiction and poetry workshops, and indeed some of her memoir-writing students have gone on to translate their real-life experiences into fiction. At the moment, some 25 students are writing novels or memoirs.
All the resulting memoirs written during her course can be uploaded to an online memoir library, which will be filed also in the online British Library social-history archive.
Graham has also instigated a new form, which she calls mini-memoir. People can do the workshop and choose to write about one particular incident or experience in their lives, and upload it to the memoir library.
“Beyond anybody publishing anything I really feel passionate about people writing their life story for future generations,” she says. “I noticed in my classes that a lot of people were intimidated by the idea of writing a whole book, and so I came up with this. Just like the short fiction form is the short story, this is the short memoir form.”
Finally, does she think the popularity of memoir writing is a healthy thing in Ireland, given the secrecy and denial that characterised this country in the past? “I think so. You know the old saying that silence is golden? I don’t agree. In my opinion, truth, not silence, is golden.”
See thememoirwritingclub.com and thecreativewritersworkshop.com
From poverty-stricken Limerick to life with the Bhagwan: 10 memorable modern memoirs
Angela’s Ashes
“Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood,” writes Frank McCourt in this account of growing up in dismal Limerick, which, on the plus side, helped him become a bestseller and win a Pulitzer.
The Speckled People
Hugo Hamilton’s beautiful, haunting story of growing up in 1950s Ireland with a nationalist Irish father and a German mother has been translated into 20 languages and is now a stage play.
A Child Called It
A New York Timesbestseller, Dave Pelzer's memoir, which detailed his shocking childhood abuse at the hands of his alcoholic mother, caused quite a stir when it was published in 1995.
A Million Little Pieces
Allegations that author James Frey had made up or exaggerated his experiences as a drug addict in this book gave rise to huge controversy. Oprah Winfrey made it clear that she was not amused.
The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion’s account of her grief following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, from a heart attack, and during the critical illness of her only child, Quintana, became an instant classic.
Running With Scissors
Hilarious, scathing and tragic, Augusten Burroughs’s tale of life with his dysfunctional parents and an even crazier shrink, who adopted him, was made into a film in 2006.
The Glass Castle
Hollywood has also come calling for Jeanette Walls, whose engaging book recounts her (and her siblings’) unconventional, poverty-stricken upbringing at the hands of their eccentric parents. The film is on the way.
This Boy’s Life
Another movie deal followed for Tobias Wolff’s account of his relationship with his mother and violent stepfather in the US in the 1950s. The film starred DiCaprio, De Niro and Ellen Barkin.
My Life in Orange
Growing up in the communes of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, whose followers all wore orange or red, was difficult, and adjusting to life back in the real world even trickier, as the late Tim Guest explains in his poignant account.
Deceived With Kindness
Life for a child in the bohemian Bloomsbury group was not as easy as one might think, as this memoir by Angelica Garnett, niece of Virginia Woolf (and daughter of Vanessa Bell), shows.
