I am not really one for memoir...
Shouldn't my work stand on its own, independent of who I am?
Yet having said I am not one for memoir, for various reasons right now I feel compelled to offer you some context, an insight into the personal world from which my work is born.
I had a stab at it - memoir that is - in 2014, but as you can see, didn’t get that far… Here’s a flavour (but maybe read to the end of the article before you open it):
Perhaps the above is insight enough for the purpose of this exercise. Or exorcism. The beginnings of a boy’s life; a boy born to parents of modest intellect with no academic achievements, working class (and most often not working), who struggled with the practicalities of life - money, domestic stability. By the time I was seventeen I’d lived in as many different places, been made homeless three times. My father had a sporadic record of insignificant criminality, and a significant record of losing money on the horses; before I was - what? - twelve, my mother confessed to having been previously married, and that she would have left my father years before if it hadn’t been for me.
Thanks. That’s a lot of guilt to dump on a child.
I should have been a nobody, an illiterate labourer, someone who would become addicted to drink, or violence, or gambling. I bunked off school enough to have slipped through the cracks…
Is that over-dramatic? I don’t think so. We ate our vegetables from cans (I cooked my first carrot aged 21); our mashed potato came from Cadbury’s. We had money on Thursdays when the social security cheque arrived; it was usually gone by Monday or Tuesday (much of it down the bingo or in the bookies). Too many weeks I sold precious toys (I had a model railway I loved and which bled away to nothing) in order to fund the next sliced white loaf / packet of Smash / fish fingers.
More reasons to ‘turn bad’ perhaps?
And yet…
I was bright. Somehow. In spite of all that background. Nature rather than nurture, perhaps? Aged 6 to 10, I was always at the top of the class; I read voraciously; I loved writing (I owned multiple typewriters before being forced to sell them for food-money). I suppose writing gave me a world in which I could escape - into which I can still escape.
Leaving school at sixteen, I returned to education two years later and discovered Auden, Yeats, Dylan Thomas and E.M.Forster - those drove me on to university. There I embraced Shakespeare, Conrad, Eliot, Pound, Joyce and the rest of the gang - and I found other people who loved loved to write.
My clan, if you like.
And then I abandoned that life - idyllic or not - in order to earn money. I knew what it was like to be poor. I didn’t want to leave university and risk any kind of penury. Someone dangled the prize of a job and a salary and a way not to have to go back home. So I took it.
Finally, nearly forty years later, I broke free.
I wrote along the way, of course I did. But fitfully, without conviction. My life was dominated in the same way most lives are dominated: love, marriage, children, divorce, work. An almost universal cycle which, for me, luckily saw the divorce part only occur once! And as I sit here now, I know that the second iteration of love / marriage / children saved my life… And freed me to try and be the writer I’ve always wanted to be.
But it’s late. A race against time.
Perhaps you can now see why Writing until the light goes out is so important to me. All that ‘reader-support publication’ stuff is bollocks really. At least in my case. That’s not what this is about at all. Not what my writing’s about.
I’m trying to justify myself in the same way as I have been since I was six.
I’m trying to make up for all the years where writing didn’t even come second.
I’m trying to prove something - or disprove something - to myself, to everyone.
I’m trying to consolidate and distil everything I have ever felt or known and give it voice. And to share it.
I want to ensure that my existence was worth something - especially after such an inauspicious beginning.
My mother died last year. My father will most likely die this. It was a conversation with him a couple of hours ago which prompted this outpouring.
And Easter’s coming, and I look forward to our children being back from Uni for a couple of weeks. I look forward to mentoring at a retreat in April; going on retreat myself in May; a family holiday in June.
I look forward to the next two words I put down one after the other, the next sentence, paragraph, page, chapter, book, poem… And I do look forward to sharing them with you. I really do.
Not because of all the crap about followers, and likes, and income - but for all the reasons stated above…
Thanks for reading.
Memoir is how I began my writing life. It's near and dear. But I'm finding that much of my fiction comes from parts of me, anyway. Kind of "auto fiction" as the kind of fiction/memoir hybrid is now called. The lines blur at times.