From the category archives:

Books

Ghost stories

July 3, 2009

There’s a moving scene in Justin Cronin’s Mary and O’Neil. O’Neil has just witnessed the birth of his first child. Alone in the hospital in the middle of the night, he makes calls to his relatives. Then he remembers his parents.

20 auto/biographies you should read

January 21, 2009

Here’s a list of 20 pieces of life writing (autobiography, biography, anything in between) I loved reading. In most cases that also means that, in reading them, I learned something new about writing lives.

Real people

October 22, 2008

I’ve written a fair bit about facts, and when I studied biography at university some time ago I showed considerable disdain for them. But sometimes I’m reminded that biography presents problems that are not merely theoretical.

A new way of labelling

September 24, 2008

I like this sketch by the Two Ronnies: Apart from making me laugh, it reminds me of two things. First, it reminds me that the way we’re used to doing things, and the way that initially seems to make most sense, isn’t the only way to do it. There’s nothing absolute about the labels we [...]

Novelists who lie

September 4, 2008

It’s strikingly common for works which merge fact and fiction to include some form of paratextual apology or explanation that fusses over the work’s precise status.I’ve already touched on this when discussing Margaret Forster’s Diary of an Ordinary Woman, whose ‘Author’s Note’ tries to draw a line between the book’s factual origins and its fictional [...]

In other words

August 6, 2008

One response to my earlier question is to say that all texts – stories, music, whatever – are re-tellings of something else. There’s no new story to tell.Two interesting books on this subject: Vladimir Propp – Morphology of the Folk Tale (includes the 31 functions of folk tales) Christopher Booker – The Seven Basic Plots [...]

Photographs and memory

April 13, 2008

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 [...]

Fiction, but true

April 12, 2008

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 [...]

Peckham Blue: Artful poetry and compelling autobiography

April 5, 2007

In Peckham Blue, Susie Gordon employs the inherently ambiguous nature of poetry to explore the inevitably unstable sense of personal history arising from having been adopted.