The Reluctant Memoirist

My novel ‘Daniel at Sea’ is a fiction that draws on ideas sheltered for many years. At its heart is a loss I experienced in my own life. Until now, I have avoided writing a memoir. Forging a narrative from the truth is harder. It is an uncertain, tentative process. Like a photographer capturing a few fleeting seconds–not the complete picture, just some indelible inkspots.

I can see eyebrows arching. What have I achieved to merit such an endeavour? I have not circumnavigated the world single-handed, fought wars or scaled icebergs. But I have survived. And along the way, I have been a beachcomber. It is a story of flotsam and jetsam, gathered up. Unruly memories, misplaced and rebellious. Writing today, in mid-life, my nascent memoir holds some of them up to the daylight.

I have always been reluctant to turn back before now. My next move would be to write another novel. Hone the craft. Develop the muscles. But then at the back of my mind is this old house, boarded up and shuttered. The orphanage of unwanted ideas. Half-written, uncared for fragments grasping for attention. During the last decade, I have confronted buried trauma. Years seeking justice for childhood abuse. As a writer, my instinct was to escape into fiction. Use it all as material. But that would not have been honest. Not what I really wanted. Circumstance had drawn me back into the details of those things: the accidents of fate, the silences and lost memories. So rather than walking on as usual, I lingered.

I have boxes of half-full notebooks. Every time I move home, I grant myself leave to spend a bit of time with them, seeking inspiration. Perhaps in my youth I had been brilliant after all. Something that will launch me now into a career-defining project.

In truth, they contain mostly inconsequential ramblings. I can see it now. Notes written on the deck of an Aegean ferry. Hoping for genius to descend. A direct arrow from the muse. But my mercurial attention span was always easily distracted. Instead, a jug of retsina and an incomplete poem later, I would probably have been chatting up a handsome boy.

These records do reveal something important. Which is probably why I have never properly confronted what is in them. I never kept a journal. In many cases I am guessing when they were written and what was going on in my life. They suggest a mind at odds with itself, constantly seeking order. In that sense, they can feel like an admonishment.

Reading back like this, I always seem to have been on the brink of renewal or transformation. Writing was what I returned to. And yet despite that, its disciplines eluded me. No doubt I was able to describe the scent of orange blossom in Seville or the sweeping turns of the Irrawaddy, but I did not yet know how to connect those experiences. I went round the long way through academia, journalism and broadcasting. There were unfinished manuscripts, plays and poems. Each a narrative of a particular time. Nothing entire or wholly reliable. I notice that the echoes do not always resonate neatly. Can memoir ever be more than glimpses of the truth?

As I am rifling through a box, the slightest fold of paper falls out of a pocket book. I can tell immediately it has been torn from a Filofax. Written on it are four words: come back to me. In a moment I am with him again. We are in the back of a car, speeding to an airport somewhere. Next I find my diaries from South America. A life-changing adventure, almost a quarter of a century ago. Not all these are a search for meaning. Many cannot be made sense of. They are all flares of time–unconnected fragments of my history.

I take the scrapbook of my life and set it in the window of an empty shop on a busy street. Most passing by are too busy to notice. But there is an old man taking each ponderous step as the people rush onwards. When he reaches the window, he stops and gazes in.