A few notes on memory and self: Jenny Sinclair

“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards…” (Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass)

The things you forget.

I’ve forgotten Mike Feury. I can’t remember a thing about him; how I came across him, what we talked about in our letters, how I felt when I saw his handwriting on an envelope amongst my mail. I’ve forgotten the laughter at his jokes and the sadness at his sorrows. I may even have forgotten his face; I don’t know, because I don’t know if I ever saw it.
Mike has been waiting for me for years, a handful of letters folded up and shoved into a cardboard box in the storage space in my roof, waiting mutely while downstairs I married, renovated, had a child. He’s been up there for five years; before that, the boxes were in the second-bedroom wardrobe of my single-girl flat; before that, stacked up in the study of yet another rental share house.
A few weeks back, I was in the roof looking for a book; I unfolded a wad of photocopied paper and found a letter beginning: “Mike, sweetheart, before you get upset at this, I’d like to make something clear…” It’s in my handwriting, but I don’t remember writing it, and I don’t remember Mike.
I have a face in my mind, a slightly puffy, just-past-handsome face, a man who has spent too long in the pub, in general and possibly that very afternoon, a Dublin man, wearing a softly hanging suit with dishevelled hair and no guile in his eyes. That’s the face a man named Mike Feury should have, but I can’t remember the real man.
There are only a handful of the letters, mostly his, and that one of mine that I thought important enough to copy before I sent it. They run into the thousands of words, and by the lack of elisions and corrections, I suspect we both thought them through, or even redrafted before putting pen to paper. But I don’t remember.


It was 1990, almost twenty years ago, but that’s no excuse. We signed our letters “love”, peppered them with jokes and teasing, a light-hearted seasoning for the real work of telling each other who we were. There must have been some discussion about our both being Geminis, because he wrote me a letter in two colours of ink, from Mike and Michael to Jenny and Jennifer; he told me, too, about his woman in Canada, the longing and the reluctance to commit; I spent pages dissecting a past love affair and why it had mad me cautious of those who felt strongly about me. We discussed books, Irish v. Australian culture, share houses, dingy flats we’d known (he called them “kips”), and what we hoped our lives would one day be.
If I strain, I think I can remember that he existed. But that’s all. And it frightens me, that I can care enough about someone to write to them, to take the risk of speaking my truth to them, and then forget them altogether.

The things you don’t forget.

When someone says “I’ll never forget”, can they mean it? Can they know what will stick in the amber of memory and what will crumble, fade, slip away into darkness?
These are some things I haven’t, and won’t, forget: the happily rolling haunches of a small yellow dog running ahead of me through the grass when I was 15; the physical sickness that was grief in autumn ten years ago this year; the stale tobacco smell that somehow matched my Pa’s yellowed skin as he sat in his smoking chair; and the smallest thing you could think of: the sound of a dog barking in the background as a woman spoke on talkback radio one dark Melbourne evening. I was listening in the car, stuck in traffic, and I thought: no one else in the world will remember that sound in five minutes. And somehow that made me feel I ought to try, and I have.
“I’ll never forget” can mean a neat filing away of a fact, or it can mean that person, that place, has performed such surgery on your soul that it has changed and you carry it in who you are. Some of the things I’ll never forget are things I have tried to forget: the end-over-end tumbling of a car down a hill at 100 ks an hour; a surgeon saying, kind but matter-of-fact: “It is cancer”; my lover saying, of the woman he’d “met”, “I feel it here, you know?” with his hand on his heart, the heart I thought was mine. These are memories I believe I’d be better off without; I don’t need analysis, I need to get on with life, but they are things I’ll never forget because they are part of me. I could as easily forget how to work, or more precisely, forget how I walk.

But then: If those memories are me, what was I before them? Who was the 24-year-old who wrote to Mike Feury if the 42-year-old is composed of what has happened since?
There’s so much to remember. It seems quite natural to me that old people forget. Either the storehouse, the space in their roof, is full, or the machinery for clearing out old memories to admit the new is rusting out. If we are just our memories, wouldn’t a 90-year-old be far more of a person than a child of nine? And that’s not so. My memories are me, and they’re not.
Memory can’t be trusted. It’s all we have, but it can’t be trusted. I don’t mean remembering to turn the gas off when you leave the house, or remembering your mother’s birthday. I mean the record of days, the jumbled pile of photographs in the mind, the idea of what has happened and why.
I’ve tried writing. Writing doesn’t help. Journal pages written into infinity can’t capture immanence, the now and now and now. All writing does is favour one moment over another, turn life into a story we can read, a letter from one person to another, (which can still be forgotten, up in the roof), but it is not memory as such. All writing does is point out that memory can’t be trusted.
So Mike’s letters, which are all of Mike now, slap me in the face. They say: “You think you know who you are, but look! You forgot this.”
(Some other letters further down the box, from other people in England and Ireland, explain Mike to me: in those pre-Internet days I must have placed an ad in the contact magazine of a club I was in, seeking friends in Europe for a visit I hoped to make: Mike was one of those who responded, but so much more. Still, I never went to see him.)
I wrote the letters at night: Friday nights, at a strange part-time job I had, sitting alone in a large office building all night, supervising a computer backup, changing tapes every hour or so. I didn’t just write to Mike: I wrote to friends and former lovers interstate, overseas, to my boyfriend who I’d see the next day, to anyone I wanted to talk to at 2 am, but couldn’t. I didn’t have much to do in that job; otherwise, I guess the letters would have been shorter.
They were written in the intensity and other-worldness of the caffeinated fluorescent-lit hours between 10pm and 4am. When I read the letter to Mike, I pick out nice phrases, pieces of honesty that I recognise: “Like many people, I have a subconscious which insists on judging event and other people by what has happened in the past. I’m aware of it, don’t much like it, but arguing with one’s subconscious is akin to using logic to sort out a situation in a dream. It doesn’t work.”
This is an analytical person with strong feelings, feelings she doesn’t want to deny, but which she would also like to pin down and control. I know that was me then, and that is the person I still am today.
I am the same person and I’m not. The test is to put these women side by side: compare and contrast. It’s an exercise that scares me a bit, makes me feel like a mother about to be judged a daughter.
Because it’s not just Mike I’d forgotten: it’s the personal honesty, the willingness to be exposed and judged, to walk around emotionally naked of defences. I don’t have those things any more: in their place are internalised social expectations, tricks I picked up over the years to allow me to function in this structured world as a worker, wife and mother. I know what she would say about that: You’re fake.
But there are things she did that I blush to remember, things I know I did, but cannot remember why. I’m talking about that cliché of the fool exposed: “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Take, say the three years before and three years after I turned 21, up to around the time I wrote to Mike.
These are the things I did: I stole. I lied. I cheated on my boyfriend. I drove a car drunk enough and fast enough to kill (but didn’t). I wasted days and weeks stoned and drunk, attending on men who didn’t deserve me.
These things seemed like a good idea at the time, and I, the newly minted parent of, say the years between 37 and 42, who five years into motherhood is just beginning to appreciate the scale of a life and what it means to be responsible for one, wants to take that girl and shake her.
But I also know: she wouldn’t listen. This is a paradox of youth: at 21 you are immortal, but you also don’t believe you’ll live to see the consequences.
And reading the earnest letter to Mike Feury, in which I told the tale of a man who felt too deeply and asked too much of me, and how I struggled with it, I know what she would say to me in reply: Look at you. Don’t you remember these things: putting love before emotional safety? Putting art before money? Putting what you know is right (equality and the state of our fragile planet, just to name two) before social ease and personal convenience?
And I’d have no reply. Because that person at 21, 24, didn’t admit to compromise, and sometimes I wonder if I should have either. I could only say in my defence: “I forgot myself.”
Forgot myself? Possibly the thing you are most likely to forget, and the thing you most need not to, is yourself.
“I forgot myself” – it’s an excuse to be offered up after bad behaviour, particularly of the insubordinate kind. It also has a lesser meaning – it can be a way of noting great joy and involvement in an experience. To forget oneself is not desirable, and yet it is. It all depends on how you go about it.
So: can I forget these 21 years and find the 21-year-old in me again, like an old snake shedding a skin? If we were only our memories, the woman of 21 would be half the one of 42. She was me, but she wasn’t just me minus 21 years. She had things I’ve lost.
That creaking machinery keeps moving things through. I’m 42 and the storehouse already feels like it’s packed to the rafters, boxes at the back never to be opened again, no matter how precious their contents seemed when they were packed away. And I’m only halfway through (I hope). Most of my family, my mother’s family, which I know best, lived and will live well into their 80s. I am one of 13 cousins, aged from early 20s to late 40s, all still alive. I can hope for 84. As long as the cancer doesn’t get me…
Cancer. Oh yes, that’s right. I nearly forgot. I had, past tense deliberate, had, don’t have any more, cancer. Just a common kind, though uncommonly early. Exactly the kind of thing one wants to forget and can’t. But the good days are those when I forget the constant threat and make plans for one, five, ten years’ time. The good days are also those when I keep in mind that life is a limited – what – not a limited thing or commodity. Life is all. There’s nothing else, or so I (dis)believe – anyway, the days when I know that life is limited are the best.
When I was in chemotherapy, I started writing a short novel. It didn’t hang together all that well, but I remain fond of the characters, particularly Marion, a suburban housewife who left it all behind and hit the road in a blue Kombi van. She’d had cancer too, but she wasn’t me: she was older, had lived less widely, knew less about herself. But we had this in common: she didn’t want to be a dying woman. But she wanted to live as if she was.
Cancer isn’t me. The memory of cancer isn’t me. Memories in general aren’t me. And cancer isn’t a gift, any more than it is a punishment for some obscure sin of attitude, as some imply. It’s often pressed into service as an easy metaphor for the hidden rot, for the weed that must be cut off at the base, then dug out and poisoned.
Although the treatments may resemble all these, it’s just a disease. To me, the interesting bit is remission: the time when you clearly know you may or may not die. This makes you no different to anyone else walking around out there with a bullet/bus/cartoon safe falling from the sky in their future: no different, but more aware. Memento mori.
It seems, from reading my angry, passionate, analytical letter, that Mike had thrown down a challenge, had asked me to drop the defences and let him help me with my inner turmoil. Perhaps he finally has.
Now, at 42, I know for sure I’m not immortal. Like the illusion of immortality, this lends bravery and perhaps it will help me to face that 21-year-old again.
She still won’t listen, because there are memories we’ll never have in common. (I wonder for a moment what I’ll have to say to myself-of-42 when I’m 63, 84, and I resolve to try to listen to the future.) She’ll never listen, but perhaps we can join hands against the compromises, and the mistakes that come out of forgetfulness of the self.
The immortal self and the very mortal do have this in common: a commitment to life without concern for consequences. It’s a kind of anti-cancer – the years in between of doing the right thing, of ticking off society’s boxes, were a remission from my self.


Perhaps she and I can install in our shared identity a little 84-year-old woman, approaching the end but with a lifetime of memories of principles upheld, risks taken and truth respected, and whenever I’m about to hold my tongue, do my duty, let a sexist/racist comment pass, whenever I have to choose between my instincts and the voices of conformity, she can rap me over the knuckles and say sharply: “Remember yourself!”

A non-bibliography: some words I thought about while writing this piece.

Kenneth Slessor, The Night Ride, in The World’s Contracted Thus, Heinemann Publishers Australia, Richmond, 1982, p 265 (“Gaslight and milk-cans. Of Rapptown I recall nothing else.”)

Blade Runner, film, 1982, Rutger Hauer’s final speech (“All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”)

Elizabeth Jolley, source unknown (from my notebooks, 1991) “I did not believe my father when he said, years ago, that two thirds of your life has to be spent doing things you do not especially want to do. I now think he was right, but it is not so bad.”)

Michael Kinsley, “Mine is longer than yours” in the New Yorker, 7/4/2008, accessed at:
http://www.newyorker.com:80/reporting/2008/04/07/080407fa_fact_kinsley , 8/6/2008(“But when it comes to the ultimate boomer game, competitive longevity, I’m doing color commentary. This is not because I’m more likely to keel over early but because having a chronic disease—or, more to the point, being known to have a chronic disease—automatically starts you on your expulsion from the club of the living.”)

William Wordsworth, My Heart Leaps Up, (“The Child is father of the Man.”), accessed at: http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww194.html, 8/6/2008

Lewis Carroll, Alice In Wonderland, Caxton Publishing, London, 1965. (“The horror of that moment,” the King went on, ‘I shall never, never forget!’
‘You will, though,’ the Queen said, ‘If you don’t make a memorandum of it.’”) (p. 143)

Sean “Diddy” Combs, video blog accessed at http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sashafrerejones/2008/05/index.html, 8/6/2008 (“I’m in love with hip-hop again.”)

History belongs, they say, to the victors, because history is written by the victors.
Most often, when this maxim is quoted, it’s quoted with cynical undertones. (The line was originally Winston Churchill’s, but has taken on a life of its own.) It suggests that history is unreliable and even tainted by the deeds committed by those victors in order to win – win the battle, win the war, win the struggle between competing religions, cultures or ways of thought.
More, it positions the right to write history as another spoil of war. When you fight, it says, you fight not only to win but for the right to be remembered as you dictate.
The biggest piece of history in the 20th century history, if there can be such a concept as a piece of history, was World War Two, and its defining feature was the Holocaust. The organised murder of six million people morally overshadows even the decision to detonate atomic bombs on civilian cities, according to Raimond Gaita, (1) who distinguishes between the racist thinking that enabled the bombing of Japan from the more immoral genocidal intent of the Third Reich’s death camps.
And technically, the Allied forces of Western Europe, America and the British Empire won WWII. But at a very meaningful level, the Holocaust succeeded. No one would put the argument that the Jews of Europe “won”. The Jewish population and culture of Germany, Austria and Poland all but disappeared, not only through the mass deaths but also through the diaspora of refugees and, after the war, voluntary relocation to Israel.
So how can the losers – the dead and the shattered survivors – write history? Of course the wider world has assisted in documenting the Holocaust and positioning it as a genocidal crime against humanity. In fact, as Gaita notes, it is often the standard against which other such crimes are measured, in the popular mind at least.
That fact in no way transforms the losers into winners, despite their moral authority and the ongoing willingness of the world to listen to their story. What might, though, achieve that transformation in some small way is to comprehensively contradict the thinking that saturated and enabled the Holocaust: the assertion that a class of people were subhuman.


Gaita writes that a crime against humanity is defined by those international laws that are “informed by a sense of the common humanity of all the peoples of the earth.” To paraphrase: a crime against humanity is not a crime against human persons per se, it’s a crime against our underlying, difficult-to-define human natures and dignity.
To allow such crimes to take place, the humanity of the victims is often denied, a point noticed by many writers. German Jew Franz Kafka made the point one way in his 1915 story The Metamorphosis – Gregor Samsa first becomes an insect and then becomes nothing to his family and society, dying unmourned.
In East of Time, the memoir which is the main focus of this essay, Jacob G. Rosenberg makes a similar point, recounting a conversation in which Hitler’s dismissal of Freud as “a louse” is compared to Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, who justifies murder by turning “a fellow human into an insect.” (2)
Rosenberg, one of the few people still alive who survived Auschwitz, has written an “autobiography” that serves a central project of reclaiming the humanity of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust. As such, it interacts with the “official” history in significant ways, serving not just to illuminate the details of history but to change our understanding of it.
At first, East of Time and its sequel, Sunrise West, could be seen as merely products of the urge to record a life before dying, like many other autobiographies written late in life, with only Rosenberg’s lively prose and gripping subject matter to lift them above the pack.
But his preface to East of Time gives a clue to the book’s significance as a work of history. (3)

As for the many individuals who populate this book, most, with one or two exceptions, are now dead, murdered during those years of darkness. Some readers may question my purpose in summoning up all these names, but the need to recall them is strong within me; perhaps it is the scriptural influence, or maybe the voice of my forefathers, to whom the mentioning of names was a sacred duty.

Much of East of Time is given over to short word sketches and vignettes about those “many individuals”. Sometimes there is historical detail, but most of the pieces more often resemble naïve memoir, putting us behind Rosenberg’s eyes as he comes of age in a Jewish community that becomes a wartime ghetto in Poland. There are repeated references to ideological and political issues and the failure of Russia and communism to help the Jews, but these don’t occupy the central place in the reader’s mind after closing the book. What linger instead are images of children playing in the street, craftspeople working in their homes and, after hours, long and complex intellectual discussions between educated, thoughtful, humorous individuals where the debate itself is as important as the outcome. And in case it all seems too perfect, Rosenberg also records adulteries, fights and injustices, not hesitating to label characters as fools or as blinded by ideology.
What Rosenberg doesn’t do here is to write “history”. This is not the official record or even a story presenting itself as “innocent” or “objective”, as Inga Clendinnen has characterised histories of the victor as trying to do. (4)
It is, though, what she calls a “complicated and multiple story.” In this, it insists on its characters’ humanity.
Before going on to discuss how I think a book like this can affect history itself, I’d like to mention another piece of Holocaust life writing, albeit biography rather than autobiography. Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost: a search for six of six million focuses on just six of the six million dead. At an event I attended at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum in 2007, he said that the book was in a way an attempt to retun the lives that were taken, to insist that these people existed and did matter. The audience, which included Holocaust survivors, murmured agreement.
There is, I’d argue, a difference between simply recording because “the mentioning of names was a sacred duty”, and the active returning of humanity to victims who had been stripped of it. Their humanity was the central issue of the Holocaust, as much as their very lives. In effect, the Nazis said: “these people are not human; they are insects; they do not deserve to live.” Books like East of Time, The Lost, Maus, The Diary of Anne Frank and The Diary of Petr Ginz, all of which focus on individual lives, never generalising or lumping people into categories insist over and over again that each and every victim was human. They don’t seek to rewrite the history of what happened, but the history of what was thought. As as the last few survivors die of old age, the written, often first-person, record of their lives will become – along with photographs and recordings – the only thing standing against that Nazi assertion.
It’s worth briefly looking at how Rosenberg’s book functions as a work of autobiography compared to other biographies and autobiographies.
It is missing many of the key features we have come to expect in an autobiography, such as a coherent timeline or even a “story” – an explicit narrative arc. Over the course of the book an arc of sorts does emerge – the sense of Rosenberg being drawn towards the inevitable summons to the concentration camp as he recounts the deaths of his fellow ghetto residents in increasing numbers – but there is no narrative pleasure for the reader in this, rather an increased desire to focus on the details, the small glimpses of hope and beauty and individuality that come with each character sketch. Possibly in this we journey alongside Rosenberg, as he shows us what it’s like to have the lights go out one by one, but to try to keep looking at the lights that remain. It’s not as if he is not angry, or capable of deep and bitter sarcasm about German efficiency and the “achievement” of the gas chambers, for instance, but it’s clear that that is Rosenberg the older writer talking, rather than the young Rosenberg who went through the ghetto experience with his family.
Rosenberg’s book purports to take the reader behind his eyes, looking out on the community, and it does this so effectively that he then gets away with “showing” events that he did not witness personally: when that happens, it’s clear that this is going beyond what we think of as autobiography.
In Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson offer both a history of autobiography in the West and a suggested taxonomy of 52 types of biography.
Their chapter on history suggests that autobiography has served the project of developing the individual as the key unit in Western society, and that in the process it has given us a convenient record of individual self-image via which to read that development.


In this chapter, the authors argue that autobiography in the West has effectively functioned as a tool to help resolve the tension between our private and public selves, and to work through the discourses that are at play in our lives.
They start with reference to pre-literate forms, like African oral genealogy and Aboriginal songlines, then move in quickly to Western life narrative.
At first, they say, it was mostly written by religious people engaged in both soul-searching and recording their spiritual travels. But during the Renaissance the secular self became a subject for autobiography, introducing a whole new range of themes and categories. Without the question of an external God, writers like Montaigne became extremely self-referential and focussed on the question of who they really were.
Autobiography also began to broaden to include the world the individual lived in, beginning with travel stories like Marco Polo’s.
In the eighteenth century, French and English writers wrote narratives that positioned themselves as being exceptional to the world they saw around them, and were therefore very individualistic and “Western” stories. This model then branched out into concerns of the individual like “lost illusions”, (The Sorrows of Young Werther), and the classic coming-of-age story that often ends with the subject about to enter their real adult life.
In America in the 18th century, life narratives presented the individual as both a distinct person and at the same time completely a product of their environment. Later American autobiography tended to be concerned with what they identify as the very American projects of becoming a self-made man and dominating nature. Even slave stories are classified as being a form of coming-of-age story as the slaves insist on their sense of self in very adverse circumstances.
Finally, Smith and Watson say that autobiography in the 20th century was a way of creating meaning as new kinds of individual subjects: for instance immigrant identity, prisoner’s stories, coming-out narratives, stories about illness and the branding exercise of celebrity or sportsman/woman autobiography.
What they fail to do is to ask why the individual matters. In East of Time, Rosenberg moves beyond this academic analysis of what an individual is and shows us why individual lives are important.
By recording a history of WWII that is not about troop movements, battles, bombings or the lives of leaders and generals, he has changed history, if history is what was said and thought about the murdered Jews, a body of thought that now includes his sympathetic words and thoughts. That history is, in the view of this book, not about facts, but about people.
In the course of doing so, he has almost accidentally achieved the autobiographical effect of showing us Jacob G. Rosenberg: what matters to him and how he deals with such horrendous events, a test of character beyond all others.
While Smith and Watson offer a list of types of life writing, * East of Time does not fit neatly into any of them.
As a “trauma narrative” it does not concern itself with the effects of the trauma on the narrator. “Witnessing” is a possible category, but Smith and Watson’s definition calls for the possibility of response, whereas it seems to me that the events in this book are simply being added to history in a way analogous to a catalyst being added to a chemical mix; with this in existence, the meaning of other histories of the Polish ghetto and Auschwitz are changed.
This is life writing – the recording of the individual life – as antidote to the underlying poison of racism, which is that it turns people into categorised objects which are then subject to reclassification as less than human: as, say, insects.
In that, East of Time is a historical document actively arguing with the Nazis not about what they did, but what they said: and winning.

having gone away for a night to work on the final piece, and had the delightfully retro experience of reworking pages of handwritten text with only scissors and stickytape technology, I was very glad to get back to the computer...now that the piece is finished I am surprised at how personal it got, given that I started out with the idea of fictional characters based on the people I knew 20 years ago, but was sidetracked by that one letter.

The Radio National Book show last Friday ran a piece about writers' archives: how archive centres keep everything, down to a writer's socks (the last he wore) in one case. I guess it's like life itself: it can be hard to know at the time what will be significant later. I marvel at the memories some writers display when they write their autobiographies, and wonder just how accurate they really are, and how much is bravado: after all, if everyone has a terrible memory for places, facts and names, it's hard to be contradicted...

the piles of paper that accumulate in my study are there for a reason, I guess. I'd just like to be better at editing and interpretation: again like life, it's a problem of too much material rather than too little. which is where word limits and deadlines come in handy. so with submission due tomorrow, I have a bizarre urge to say of this blog: The End.

Essay finished, as far as it's going to be finished. A deadline three weeks away would suggest the possibility that it could be improved, but it's time to move on to the creative piece.

Completely irrelevant to that is the reading of The Pillow Book that has taken up my free time the last couple of days. I had never heard of it before this year; bought a copy overseas but it turns out to be a 2006 edition by an Australian translator, Meredith McKinney. And it's just lovely: very little in the way of story but such finely noted observations that it's like watching a Japanese scroll unfolded before you. It gave me a use for the silk-bound notebook I also got on that same overseas trip...have begun writing little subheadings similar to those she uses with observations listed beneath them...so she might have a section headed "refined and elegant things", and I have a page headed "matters of small private amusement," another headed "false notes" and so on. of course her book was partly a workbook, intended as a source and reference for her composition of poems. but it's a different style to the usual journal entry, in which I feel I have to draw some sort of conclusion: I like the idea of saying "this is a delightful/annoying/intriguing thing", describing the thing itself and then letting it rest, like an artist picking up small bits of colour and texture in their daily round and storing them for later reference.

creative piece notes: still undecided about which to do. still inclined to the more analytical mining of the past - things you forget, things you don't - which on reflection are in fact relevant to Sei Shonagon's style - but need to start all over again, to find something I want to say within that rather than the forced filling-400-word-segments stuff I've come up with so far.

have realised that the Book Show's First Person readings (the last 20 minutes of the show every day) fit into this subject perfectly. all that time I was "reading" for the subject and didn't know it! they actually read some Shonagon last week, which is what made me pick the book out of my unread-books pile.

reading entry 9/5/08

it does seem to be true that once you start looking for this stuff, it’s everywhere.

just a few examples that have grabbed me: a short New Yorker piece about Erica Jong in which her sister took over a writer’s event to complain about the way she (the sister) and her husband were portrayed in Fear of Flying… that even when it’s fiction, if the central character is clearly based on the author, people are likely to make assumptions about the identity and real-life behaviour of secondary characters.

The Australian Literary Review, 7/5/08, Tim Parks on Julian Barnes and the way he weaves his biography into a discussion of what it means to die…and Luke Davies’ review of a book by Kathleen Stewart, of whom I’d never heard but now must chase down; Davies analyses how the awful childhood revealed in the new (autobiographical) book, The After Life, fed into the emotional tones and themes of Stewarts’ previous fictions. This is life writing as a kind of key to the fiction, I guess.

And Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, a how-to-write book a friend passed on to me…seems to be aimed at pretty much complete beginners with writer’s block, and is quite emphatic about examining memory, writing on personal matters and events…I haven’t finished it yet so I can’t say if it really shows how the detailed description of, say, school lunches, can be useful in creating fiction.

( blogger doesn't seem to be allowing me to classify posts at the moment, but this one falls under the category of work towards the creative piece)

Have spent a lot of the last couple of weeks writing 2500 words on a trip to Queensland I did 20 years ago, and its aftermath, I thought seriously about using that as a basis for my main creative piece. But it's been submitted to the magazine I wrote it for and I don't feel as if it would help to rework it.

Still, the topic of the magazine - Hidden Queensland - and the nature of the piece, which explored the undercurrent of hippy/Queensland influences in my otherwise pretty middle-class Melbourne life - has made up my mind to work on the unremembered-past piece, out of the three I've been considering. It does risk being solipsistic but (in reference to the quality of the writing in the Garner book and in the Didion), I think as long as I keep trying to turn the individual events outwards to more general themes it might be OK.

Someone referred yesterday to the Age A2 piece on 20/4 about the Italian broadcaster who has written a biography despite having no interesting dark secrets - this is the question that arises if you don't have any unusual drama in your life - why write about it? To do so is basically saying that I am "clever" enough (in the Kate Holden sense?) to make what I'm writing worthwhile for itself.

The easier option would be to go for the dramatic moments - the car crash, cancer, moments of great danger - but the thing is that over the course of a life, pretty much everyone has those moments too. It's all about interpretation.

Next step: to dig up that box of letters and read for a bit.