Writing a confessional memoir is not just a way of dealing with yourproblems, it can also help others, Shivaun Woolfson tells Rosita Boland
Any memoir that comes with the subtitle A Survivor's Story will bring a lot of baggage with it. Home Fires: A Survivor's Story, by Irishwoman Shivaun Woolfson is her first book, and she is awaiting its publication with mixed feelings.
"I'm apprehensive about it," she says, in a phone interview from her London home. "I've wanted to write a book since I was six, so this is a huge achievement for me. But it's a double-edged sword because of the material in the book."
Woolfson was born into a well-off Jewish family in Dublin in the 1950s, and a sizeable proportion of her memoir refers to her family. The apprehension arises because her relatives, many of whom are still living, have neither seen the book or had any input into the text and how they are portrayed. And Woolfson is very hard on her family in certain sections of the book.
Memoir is, by definition, one person's recollection of events. Many people took exception to Frank McCourt's grim portrait of Limerick in Angela's Ashes. But, as he pointed out in defence, that was his memory and his experience of the time and place.
Woolfson is equally aware that elements of her story may not square with the memories of those close to her. "Their perception of how my life was as a child would be very different than mine," she says. Although she had a privileged upbringing, Woolfson's childhood was neither happy nor secure. Huge rows punctuated her childhood. When her mother finally left to live elsewhere, she also took her daughter's trust in a family unit, and this broken trust has haunted her life since.
The Jewish community in Dublin was, and still is, small. Did coming from a community which could be seen to be on the margins of society compound Woolfson's sense of not belonging? "Yes. I was not a good Jewish girl. My feeling of exile began a long time before I went away. I was part of a peripheral community, and I was already becoming a person who lived life on the periphery before I even left Dublin. I was already gravitating towards the edge."
As a teenager, there were lots of unsuitable friends, underage drinking and dope-smoking. She dropped out of Trinity, was a Boomtown Rat groupie for a time, and hung out with that band and a newly-formed group called U2. She moved into a house that was set up as an ashram, and lived with followers of Guru Maharaji.
Unsurprisingly, none of this went down well at home. At 21, she sold off most of her possessions in the Dandelion Market (getting £20 for a signed copy of The Boomtown Rats's Tonic for the Troops) and flew to the US in search of Guru Maharaji, who was at that time living in Miami.
Miami turned out to be home for 21 years. "They say Miami is like the Bermuda Triangle; you can't find a way out." The story of those years is not a happy one. Life in Miami was sunny in weather terms only. "I've been searingly honest about myself, and harder on myself in the book than on anyone else," Woolfson maintains, and it is true that she presents herself in a harsh light.
She made appalling judgments of character, including that of marrying an ex-convict, philandering Cuban. She writes that she neglected her two children for a long time, could not hold down a job and was still financially dependent on her father for the entire period in the US. When she finally booted out her husband, she took up with a loathsome crack dealer who regularly beat her. After that, she had a doomed relationship with a woman of 18, which she writes about in painful detail.
Woolfson now lives in London with her grown-up sons, has found a degree of stability in her life and teaches creative writing in prisons. "I find a home on the edge," she says wryly.
It's a brave thing to make such a public forensic assassination on your own character. People will undoubtedly read this book and wonder why Woolfson wanted to publish it. Writing about an unhappy past and shoving the manuscript in a drawer after getting some catharsis from the act of recording it is one thing, but choosing to publish it - as many people are now doing - is another.
She points out that "confessional writing" has long been a huge genre in the US. It is unsurprising that a country which produced Jerry Springer is big on confessional writing. "There's a healing, almost redemptive quality in this writing," she comments, which begs the question, is it not the writer being healed rather than the reader? "I hope people will be moved by my testimony," Woolfson says staunchly. "That they will see it as a map of courage and survival."
And is Shivaun Woolfson happy now that she's taken control of her life, moved back to Europe, has a job she enjoys, children with whom she has a good relationship and the longed-for book under her belt? She gives a bitter little laugh. "I don't believe in happiness," she says, and the sad thing is that she sounds like she really means it.
Home Fires, a Survivor's Story, by Shivaun Woolfson, is published by Atlantic Books at £16.99 sterling
