Memory, Life-writing and conflicting recollections
Notes and quotes on ‘writing the self’ for weblog.
‘Confessionalism has to know when to hold back. Honesty has to be worked at. ‘A little sincerity is a dangerous thing,’ said Wilde, ‘and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.’
‘Thomas Hardy once said that there was an “infinite mischief” in “the mixing of fact and fiction in unknown proportions”.
‘good non-fiction does inevitably employ many of the devices of fiction: narrative, characterization, suspense, surprise, and a sense of beginning-middle-end.. In other words, selectivity and detachment are as much a part of confessionalism as other forms of writing.’
‘A little wariness seems appropriate, since memoirs depend on memories, which are often false. When an author recalls in exhaustive detail a scene form thirty years ago we may wonder if it happened exactly that way.’
The above quotes are from Blake Morrison’s introduction to Too True. (Blake is my supervisor at Goldsmiths.)
I work at Kingston University and on 11 May 2006 we had a seminar on Biography and Life Writing. Paul Bailey is a writer in residence on the Creative Writing programme and he began his talk by saying, ‘A lot of people think they can write a memoir by sticking to the facts of their life…’
‘Confessionalism has to know when to hold back. Honesty has to be worked at. ‘A little sincerity is a dangerous thing,’ said Wilde, ‘and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.’
‘Thomas Hardy once said that there was an “infinite mischief” in “the mixing of fact and fiction in unknown proportions”.
‘good non-fiction does inevitably employ many of the devices of fiction: narrative, characterization, suspense, surprise, and a sense of beginning-middle-end.. In other words, selectivity and detachment are as much a part of confessionalism as other forms of writing.’
‘A little wariness seems appropriate, since memoirs depend on memories, which are often false. When an author recalls in exhaustive detail a scene form thirty years ago we may wonder if it happened exactly that way.’
The above quotes are from Blake Morrison’s introduction to Too True. (Blake is my supervisor at Goldsmiths.)
I work at Kingston University and on 11 May 2006 we had a seminar on Biography and Life Writing. Paul Bailey is a writer in residence on the Creative Writing programme and he began his talk by saying, ‘A lot of people think they can write a memoir by sticking to the facts of their life…’
posted by Alp at Wednesday, July 12, 2006
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