My most recent book is a memoir. It’s the sort of memoir people call “brave”, in the same way that having a home birth was “brave” and moving to Iceland with small children during the 2008 financial crisis was “brave”. In this context, “brave” means “you’re off your head”.
For the record, I regret none of these decisions. All of them brought moments of self-doubt but even during and immediately after the experiences, most of the time the courage of my convictions carried me through. There’s something exhilarating about the point at which a questionable decision becomes irrevocable and all that’s left are the consequences.
The consequences of publishing a “brave” memoir can be serious. Relationships end, often not because the writer has written spitefully or discourteously about her friend or relative, but because she has written at all. Understandably, many people don’t like to see themselves as others see them and in print, even if the view is flattering. Offence is given not by obvious insult but by the acts of writing and publishing, by making public and taking control of one version of a story that, like all stories, has many possible iterations and points of view.
I have a friend whose ex-partner wrote about him in her memoir. She didn’t want to upset him with her book, so she said as little as possible allowing for the fact that they had been a couple for decades and she was writing about her own life, which was also, inevitably, his life. He saw the manuscript and agreed to its publication; it said nothing bad about him. But, he told me a year later, in some ways he’d rather have been depicted as a little more colourful. In trying to protect her ex-partner, my friend had rendered him dull and bland. She’d done harm by the act of publishing, not by what she actually wrote. If she was going to write memoir – since she was going to write memoir – there was no way not to do some damage, however mild and careful, to the central relationships of her life.
Some say you’re not a writer if you’re not willing to sacrifice your family to your art. Not me
Being English in Ireland, I often sense I’m being too frank
I’m a university professor but I’ve never been greatly invested in my own kids’ grades
It was only after moving to Ireland from England that I had deep conversations about emigration
I used to teach life writing alongside a colleague who told our students that memoir is a contact sport and people get hurt, don’t play if you can’t handle it. You’re not an writer, he used to say, if you’re not willing to sacrifice your family to your art. I told them the opposite: writers have the same responsibilities to family, friends and community as everyone else. Make your choices and live with the consequences; I draw the line at exposing my kids, and I gave everyone else who appears in my book the chance to set boundaries and request anonymity before publication.
But I am by far the most exposed person, writing about a lifetime of wrestling with family, community and society narratives about food and the female body. Even – perhaps especially – a true story makes a character of its own narrator. What I have written is what I experience as truth, though other people have other memories of the same events, but even so the narrator of my memories is not the version of me who moves through the world, teaching and sitting on committees and doing the grocery shopping. It’s an ongoing project, but I haven’t found a way of representing in narrative prose the wild complexity and polyphony of real life, the way thoughts and conversations and weather and traffic, being in the world and the body, interweave and overlap in ways that don’t lend themselves to sentences and paragraphs. All stories, even the true ones, are fiction: there is no way to represent the world without interpreting it.
So yes, maybe in some ways I am “brave” (insane, reckless, foolhardy) to write about the episodic dissolution of my mind and body, but these things happen, and because they happen we need forms of art for thinking about them. The relationships I’ve bruised in the process were already cracked and sore. Life writing asks the writer to live with the consequences of taking writing seriously. I do.
Sarah Moss will be in conversation with Emilie Pine and Octavia Bright at High Stakes Life Writing at MoLI at 6pm on Monday Oct 14th. The event is sold out.