This week I want to give an unashamed plug to the Irish Hospice Foundation's latest fundraising venture, LifeStory, writes John Waters.
If any single trend can be underlined in recent Irish art and literature, the slow supplanting of the novel by the memoir is perhaps the most interesting - though also potentially problematic.
The most talked-about books of the past two decades have been autobiographies or, less often, biographies.
Anyone who attains even the most basic degree of fame these days is, within a short time, snapped up by a publisher to write a memoir. Even novelists who write stories all the time have taken to the memoir, as though sensing that something has happened to the quality of truth available through fiction.
John McGahern once said that real life was "too thin to be art". He was, at the time, proffering a reason for not writing his own memoirs. And yet, at the end of his life, he wrote one, and called it Memoir.
This emerging trend has undoubtedly some tenuous link to the thinking behind LifeStory, the project unveiled last week by the Irish Hospice Foundation (IHF). It follows up on the fantastically successful 2000 project, The Whoseday Book, a collection of 366 contributions by Irish artists (one for every day of the year) which raised more than €3 million for the IHF.
LifeStory is an adaptation for the Irish market of the "memory book", an idea that has been around for a while but has never, I would say, been realised as effectively or as elegantly as in LifeStory.
(I was the editor of LifeStory, but the rightness and urgency of the cause licenses me to dispense with false modesty.) The project marketing slogan is: "everyone has a book in them. This one is yours."
With the blessing and inspirational assistance of the celebrated novelist Maeve Binchy, we have compiled LifeStory as a means to enable Irish families, couples and individuals, of any age, to begin and see through the process of compiling and writing their own life histories.
LifeStory makes easy the gigantic task of constructing and getting down the story of your and/or your family's life. It is for grown-ups to give to their children as a record of who they are, but also for children to begin creating their own stories out of the results of interrogating their elders, for lovers to complete and exchange as a token of their love, for friends to compare their memories of parallel journeys up to the point of encounter.
Suppose, writes Maeve Binchy in her introduction, books like this had been the common currency of historical figures, look at how much we would have known about the mindset of so many people we can only guess about.
Did Alexander know he was "the Great"? Did St Francis always like animals when he was a child? Was Judy Garland ever happy? Did Wolfe Tone think his dream would come true in one generation?
Organised into more than 20 sections, each introduced with a passage from a celebrated Irish memoir, LifeStory provides a simple writing template, with prompts and nudges to get the pen moving.
It is a clothbound book, beautifully designed by Ed Miliano, with its own slipcase and a built-in folder for precious personal or family momentos. It sells for €40 and would make a perfect Christmas gift for any individual or family.
LifeStory arrives, as I say, at a moment of interesting shifts in Irish society and literature. In a time of advancing technological change, it invites us to retrace our steps, literally and technologically, eschewing the keyboard and the textpad in an attempt to recapture the past by means of the near-obsolescent pen or pencil.
It comes also at a time when Irish literature appears to be undergoing a seismic shift from the novel to the memoir, with many writers turning to autobiography as a means of accessing the deeper truths of their own lives and the life of society.
I find myself in an odd position in one tangential sense as editor of LifeStory, since I have on a couple of occasion recently raised what I believe are important ethical questions about the continuing trend towards creating literal literature out of the raw reality of real human lives.
To write one's life story means perforce to write also of the lives of others, who may not have had the opportunity to tell their own truths. (LifeStory could help to redress this, of course.) Already, arising from the half shelf of recent Irish memoirs, there is a growing line of villains - generally males - who have become so blackened by their treatment in the memoirs of their celebrated offspring or relatives as to leave behind only this negative impression.
I was discussing this at the LifeStory launch last week with Hugo Hamilton, who has written a couple of fine volumes of memoirs, and we have agreed not merely to differ about it but to do so trenchantly in public shortly as a way of promoting the LifeStory project, about which we are equally and harmoniously passionate.