I recently attended a conversation between A.S. Byatt and Stephen Rose at the Purcell Room. They were talking about memory, promoting the anthology Byatt co-edited.
They said many interesting things, but one stood out for me.
Asked to discuss the relationship between memory and the imagination, Byatt explained that she prefers to write solely using the […]

You might know that I am interested in the relationship between photographs and memory.
There was a time when people thought of memory as “capturing” the past as photographs claim to. We’re not so naïve now, about either process.
Millicent, Margaret Forster’s fictional “ordinary woman“, writes in her diary:
It’s become so impossible to believe […]

Margaret Forster is a biographer and novelist, and in Diary of an Ordinary Woman she merges the two forms.
Presented as the edited diary of Millicent King, born in 1901, the book is, in fact, Forster’s invention. An author’s note explains that, having been promised the diaries of a real-life ‘Millicent’ that never materialised, Forster […]