It seems as though life writing has never
been more popular than it is at present, for reader and for writer.
Gone are the days when ‘biography’ invariably meant a carefully
researched volume on someone deemed to have historical or political
significance or to be of literary merit, and to come complete with a
daunting set of footnotes, references and a lengthy bibliography. Such
biographies still have a very important role in life writing, but
these days the field is much broader, encompassing everything from the
ghostwritten autobiographies of celebrities and sports stars to
so-called ‘misery memoirs’. Many people want to write about someone’s
life, perhaps their own, and there are courses to suit every level of
interest, from university masters degrees to local college
qualifications.
Sally Cline and Carole Angier, both successful
biographers in their own right, have for some years run a popular and
successful course on life writing for the Arvon Foundation at Lumb Bank.
This book is an attempt to transfer that course to paper for those
who can’t attend in person. As such, the book has been structured to
mimic an Arvon course as much as possible, with the team teaching of
Cline and Angier accompanied by the contributions of ‘guest writers’,
plus exercises for the aspiring writer to carry out. As the authors
note, to teach creative writing is to have a conversation during which
writing is shared and compared, and this book attempts to reproduce
those conversations as much as it possibly can.
As Anthony Sher has commented, ‘Nothing is
more interesting than people’s lives.’ However, to try to tell the
story of someone’s life is to have to deal with the fact that life
writing is seen as somehow second-class, neither a proper act of
creativity, as with writing a novel, nor a proper historical endeavour,
even if it is exhaustively researched. The biographer, as Virginia Woolf
noted, ends up somehow ‘betwixt and between’. However, as Cline and
Angier show, life writing is challenging in other ways. Some regard
biography as an invasive and undesirable intrusion into privacy; the
writer must always be keenly aware of an assortment of ethical issues,
with the threat of either an overly controlling subject or libel
proceedings lurking in the background.
However, at the heart of any life writing lie
the twin issues of truth and objectivity. How does the writer deal
with the fact that, at best, any account of a life is partial, shaped by
the availability of material, the potentially unreliable memories of
subjects and witnesses, the potential need to suppress or carefully
censor material so as not to unnecessarily distress the living. Archives
can be incomplete, documents are not necessarily reliable. Authors have
been known to carefully construct archive smokescreens, while Cline
tells a story that suggests a scholar either stole or misfiled material
to frustrate later researchers. Writers’ individual approaches vary.
Angier seems to favour a certain distance from a character while Cline
sees herself as rescuing lives through acts of empathy. Both are equally
valid but different methods suit different temperaments. Nonetheless,
both writers are clear that the life writer has a responsibility to the
truth, however they choose to present the facts.
As tutors, Cline and Angier are keen to
show the myriad ways in which life writing has been handled and offer a
fascinating survey of the history of biography. This is followed
by personal stories and advice from thirty-two exponents of life
writing, talking about their various experiences in trying to write
biography or memoir, touching on many of the issues raised by Angier and
Cline in the first part of the book.
Finally, Cline and Angier provide a brisk and
helpful guide on how to set about writing a life story, touching on
such issues as choosing a suitable subject, planning a biography,
carrying out research and, once again, how to keep in mind the ethical
issues contingent in such writing. Its practicality neatly
counterbalances the theoretical underpinnings of the earlier sections.
In all, if you are contemplating writing a biography or a memoir,
this book is an invaluable guide to the philosophical and practical
pitfalls of life writing. It is a sensible account of life writing from
experienced practitioners of what is both art and craft, and I recommend
it!
