Lorna Sage’s prize-winning Bad Blood is just the latest sensation in a growing trend, writes Claire Armistead
The late Lorna Sage was a professor of English with some distinguished academic books to her name. But the work she will be remembered for is a childhood memoir. Bad Blood carried off the Whitbread biography award, only narrowly missing the overall prize.
What is it about the book that has so caught the imagination? Why are memoirs so popular? What exactly is a memoir?
According to one publisher, the memoir boom started with St Augustine and was given a new impetus in the 20th century by Freud’s emphasis on self-revelation. According to another, it is a largely American phenomenon. In fact, it is a dizzyingly broad genre, ranging from ghosted autobiography to what might be called interpretative fiction a form that allows the possibility that someone else might have an entirely different reading of the same events. One of its few common denominators is that it shows a life refracted through a particular experience whether that be childhood, war or sleeping with a Rolling Stone.
Thousands pour off the world’s presses every year: Frank McCourt’s two books have taken up permanent residence at the top of the bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic; Nick Hornby’s memoirs chronicling the obsessions of the young urban male have created a whole new sub-genre of their own.
You can find specific reasons for the success of individual memoirs McCourt’s was driven by America’s sentimental attachment to its Irish roots. But Angela’s Ashes and ‘Tis are not alone in appearing to feed a ravenous hunger for personalised history. We wolf down terrible stories of abuse and neglect, we gobble up lives that somehow chime with our own; we nibble at the exotic, the strange and the exciting.
Last year’s crop gives a sense of the huge range of memoirs, from the pedigree literary excitement of Martin Amis’s Experience to the puppyish cavortings of Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. But one feature of the genre is that it is not the preserve of the big international publishing house.
The Road from Nab End, one man’s reminiscences of growing up in the Lancashire weaving heartlands in the depression, has sold 19?000 copies for Eland Press, while an amusing anecdotal memoir of national service, Brasso Blanco and Bull, has notched up 30?000 sales for Constable Robinson, after initially being self-published by its author Tony Thorne. These might not be the McCourt millions, but it puts the unknown Thorne neck-and-neck in sales terms with Amis. Amis’s Experience represents one of the most common forms of memoir it offers celebrity, a recognisable sensibility and the private version of stories that have already been played out in public. Kingsley Amis, it has been said, emerges from the book like a character in a Martin Amis novel hardly surprising, since memoir is all about the appropriation of memory. John Bayley’s memoir of his wife, Iris Murdoch, offended some with its skewed intimacy, its immodest rummaging in the marital sock-drawer. Elegy for Iris is a loving account of the indestructibility of an individual, even when most of what she represented has been blotted out. Yet because Murdoch is famous for something quite other than Alzheimer’s disease, it also appeals to our prurience. Does the quality of its writing make this memoir any nobler than, say, Ike Turner’s squalid (ghosted) account of his drugs, violence and adultery? On the contrary, in some ways its literary quality makes it less noble. As Frank Kermode said in his autobiography: “My belief is that the honest truth, insofar as this suggests absolute fidelity to historical fact, is inaccessible; the minute you begin to write it you try to write it well and writing well is an activity that has no simple relation to truth. For memory cannot do the necessary work independently of fantasy …” Bayley is a well-known writer writing about another well-known writer. But the startling point about many of today’s star memoirists is that they are not famous. Who has ever heard of Andrea Ashworth, unless they happen to be one of the 175?000 people who have bought copies of her memoir Once in a House on Fire? One of the most familiar tricks of the genre is to appear to be self-deprecating while actually painting a picture of heroic endurance. Eggers plays the trick in reverse he declares himself heroic and then constantly undermines his own plausibility. He flies so close to the invisible boundary between fact and fiction that his book was reviewed several times as a novel.
If Eggers’s games with truth and invention offer one perspective on relationship between fiction and memoir, Margaret Drabble’s latest novel offers another. The Peppered Moth calls itself a novel, but is so clearly a settling of family scores that it is, at the very least, flirting with the conventions of memoir. Drabble has admitted that Bessie northern scholarship girl turned shrewish wife and sour, suffocating matriarch is based on her own mother, but has not declared it a memoir, preferring to clothe her memories in the figleaf of fiction. Yet is it possible that, in its open-endedness, the memoir is actually more generous than fiction, and that is what we instinctively value about it? Certainly, some of the best-selling memoirs (Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called It, about appalling child abuse, or Anne Karpf’s The War After, about her parents, who survived the Holocaust) tell stories that are so grim or so apparently incredible that they would be unsellable as fiction.
Perhaps the key to the memoir boom lies in the crisis of historical confidence that the last century wreaked on us. We don’t trust the history books. But we look for lives that intersect with the bits of history that affect us. The great power of the memoir is that, when it works, it touches a common humanity we sometimes fear no longer exists.