Memoir in fragments: mapping family and place

Abstract

The methodology used here is experimental, with the aim of demonstrating creative writing as the performance of a double act, bringing together both the exegetical discussion and memoir, to produce writing as a radical form of creative inquiry. The reader’s experience is shaped by the disjunctive impact of collected fragments drawn from ideas, thoughts and stories, threaded together by the writer’s perspective. I engaged with literature written by a wide variety of thinkers and creative practitioners from the field of life-writing (including Knausgaard in Barron, 2013; Tumarkin 2014; Hustvedt 2011, 2012; Nelson, 2007; Manguso, 2015; Yuknavitch, 2010; Strayed, 2012), choosing their work as representational of the writerly point of view. Though some sources differ in their scholarly weight, each author is significant to me in terms of the underpinning idea that stories ‘disrupt us, shift the axis of our universe, nudge us word by word into unchartered spaces’ (Rendle-Short 2008: 329). This nudging into uncharted spaces can happen with any style of writing. The chosen practitioners are specifically applicable to what I was attempting, which is to create a narrative that reflects the disrupted and fragmentary experience of the lived. I interrupted story threads to comment on the process of composition and the writerly choices I made. Instead of focusing on crafting a novelistic narrative, I drew attention to a text made up of imagistic writing, directing the reader’s attention to the messiness, discontinuities, gaps and unreliability of memory. I used an overview of literature on memoir-writing in general, and examples of fragmented memoir in particular. Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin and Rebecca Solnit were my guiding authors. I modelled my writing on Woolf’s disposition for reflecting on the creative process, Benjamin’s radical narrative form, and Solnit’s technique of mapping memory to place. I was questioning how memories change as a result of the process of writing; who is the authorial ‘I’; how does memory relate to physical place; in what way are photographs like memoir; how does structure speak; what are the risks and strategies for writing and trauma; and how does one cope with self-censoring feelings of guilt and shame? The process was always about finding a fresh way to write private into public. The enquiry at the forefront was always about why life stories needed to follow an order, when memories and lives do not. Writing the memoir and exegesis was a winding journey, one that eventually took off in a mad way, bringing together the creative and the exegetical as interwoven facets of the same account through a technique of fragmentation. This produced an integrated document that exemplifies what Claire Woods argues for post-graduate candidates to do, which is to link ‘the creative and the critical... so that their understanding of theory can be revealed alongside their creative work’ (Woods 2007). This hybrid memoir made the text more meaningful, intervening in/with the act of writing. The how of the writing developed from two observations: one about blending, the other about divisions. As a creative scholar, I needed to bend usual form into a style that could absorb and reference two (seemingly) different genres. The ‘essayification of memoir’, I might call this, uses ‘both a scholarly and a poetic technology’ (Webb 2011: 8). My submission is also a way to explore the compressed segments of remembering, observing and researching, to discover how they might guide, influence or enhance the writing. It is writing to ‘rhythm rather than plot’ (Rendle-Short 2015: 95). It is also about knowing when to stop, an often-difficult process of scaling back to reveal more by saying less. This investigation is to be about: me, my family, and other memoirists; the best approach for revelations; a study of experts in the field; finding strategies to cope with the writing production and what the writing itself might reveal. Illuminating form eventually became the focus: fragmentary writing lent itself to conveying personal anecdotes alongside selected quotes from experts, the process intertwining experiential knowledge and external sources. As Dominique Hecq has put it: ‘creative writing is a way of apprehending, knowing and being in the world; and more specifically it functions simultaneously as a perspective, an epistemology and an ontology specific to writing’ (Hecq 2012: 1).