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:

His parents have been dead for sixteen years, but he still remembers their telephone number, and without thinking he dials it, surprised to be doing it, and by the way it feels and sounds: a sequence of bright tones that resonates inside him like an echo on a canyon wall, as strange and familiar as his own heartbeat. O’Neil intends to listen to the phone ring a couple of times and then hang up, but thern there is a click on the line.

“Hello?” It is a woman’s voice, groggy with sleep. “Honey?”

“I’m sorry,” O’Neil says. He thinks at first she is an older woman, then that she is young, then neither; old or young, he doesn’t know. “I didn’t mean–”

“Honey? What time is it?” He hears the woman turn over, and then the scratch of the alarm clock on her bedsie table as she pulls it toward her. “Is it midnight?” she asks. “Where are you?”

For a moment O’Neil does not answer. The phone is slick in his damp hand. “It’s late,” he says finally. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have woken you.”

The woman’s breathing in the receiver is deep and even, like sighing, and O’Neil thinks she may have fallen back asleep.

“Mmmm. I was having the strangest dream. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” O’Neil says. He hesitates, then speaks again. “I think everything’s working out just the way I wanted it.”

“That’s nice to hear. It’s nice when everything works out like that.” The receiver rustles against her face as she pulls the covers close. “Honey? You sound … I don’t know. Far away.”

“I’m really okay,” O’Neil says. “A little tired. It’s been quite a day. I have some news too.”

“I know,” the woman says sleepily. “You love me.”

The answer is easy to give. “I do. Of course I do.”

I wish you were here, honey. Let everybody else handle things for a while. Can you? Just come home.”

“I will,” O’Neil says. “As soon as everything’s taken care of here, I’ll come straight home.”

“Come home, my darling. Say it: I’m coming home.”

“I’m coming home.”

“And you miss me.”

O’Neil thinks of his parents, gone so long, taken from him when he was just a boy in college, standing at the door with his key in his hand. “Yes, I miss you. It’s awful, missing you.”

“I miss you too,” the woman says, and then – so gently O’Neil doesn’t realize what has happened – she hangs up the phone.

The scene has a ghostly quality. It takes place in the middle of the night, the phone number is “strange and familiar”, and the woman is outside of time, neither old nor young – or perhaps both. O’Neil sounds far away, and the woman has just awoken from a strange dream.

O’Neil and the woman are not really talking to each other – they each use the other’s words to signify something that matters to them. But it seems important that neither of them denies the identity the other has imposed on them. O’Neil feels that he can say the words the woman presses him to say – it doesn’t matter that he is not the person she thinks he is.

And yet, there is another way of reading this passage – another interpretation, in which the woman is O’Neil’s mother, and both speakers’ words can be taken at face value. The scene gets its ghostly nature, in part, from the fact that this possibility is never entirely overruled.

Perhaps there is also something here about the inevitable distance involved in communication – particularly over the telephone, at midnight, when we are half-asleep. O’Neil never gets to tell his important news, because the woman has something else in mind. Perhaps there is a sense in which we always misinterpret one another’s words – in which there is always a more significant meaning, for the listener, than what was intended.

You may have noticed that I’ve inherited the blogger’s love of lists.

Today I’m going to list 20 pieces of life writing (autobiography, biography, anything in between) I’ve enjoyed reading. In most cases, that also means that, in reading them, I learned something new about writing lives.

Over time I want to address why each of these works helped develop my understanding of the genre. So, if the words are clickable, that means you can read more about what these books did for me.

Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot

Ken Dornstein, The Boy who Fell Out of the Sky

Margaret Forster, Diary of an Ordinary Woman

James Frey, A Million Little Pieces

Glen David Gold, Carter Beats the Devil

Susie Gordon, Peckham Blue

Edmund Gosse, Father and Son

Ian Hamilton, In Search of J.D. Salinger

Richard Holmes, Footsteps

Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

Matthew Alan Kreib, Filling a Gap: Authorship and Identity in Collaborative Autobiography

Roman Krznaric, Christopher Whalen and Theodore Zeldin (eds), The Oxford Muse: Guide to an Unknown University

Karoline Leach, In the Shadow of the Dreamchild

Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

Yann Martel, Self

Marjane Sartrapi, Persepolis

Marcus Sedgwick, Blood Red Snow White

Art Spiegelman, Maus

Francis Spufford, The Child that Books Built

Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity

I’m currently enjoying Body Parts, Hermione Lee’s collection of essays on life writing.  Just as Mark Bostridge’s Lives for Sale did about four years ago, this book is renewing my recently waning interest in reading about biography.  Here’s a quick snippet:

[M]ost biographical facts are open to interpretation.  But they do exist, and lie around biographers in huge files and boxes, waiting to be turned into story.  These facts have owners: they belong to the lives of the biographer’s subject and the people whom the subject knew, loved, hated, worked with or brought up, or perhaps met once in the street in passing.  All these people will feel a claim over the fact that concerns them.

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 passages like this remind me that biography presents problems that are not merely theoretical.

I like the precariousness of life writing – I like the questions it asks about authorship, history, storytelling, reading and writing.  But, while I chatter on about the illusory nature of truth in biography, I forget that it is about real people – people who did live, in spite of the challenges facing their biographers.

It’s possible to become callous about biography when I take this perspective, discussing books like The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky, Wrong Rooms or Maus as “relational narratives” whilst failing to mention that they are also, in essence, human stories about grief, love and guilt.

In her wonderful book, The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm describes (amongst many other things) her hunt for the truth about Sylvia Plath.  In one memorable passage she comes close to Ted Hughes, even approaching his house.  Then, realising that somebody is at home, she retreats, feeling “shame at my complicity in the chase that has made his life a torment”.

How often do we assess lives without remembering that they are the lives of real people?

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 apply to things, nothing intrinsic.  In a conventional library, we arrange books according to subject matter.  In the Two Ronnies’ absurd library, colour dictates where books go.  On my book shelf at home, practical restraints mean that the heaviest books must go at the bottom, and the lightest at the top.  There are different ways of arranging things.

Second, it brings to light the fact that not all systems are equally valid.  Arranging books according to their colour may seem to make sense to the library staff member, but he has committed the first sin of customer service by devising a system that satisfies him rather than serving his customer.  What’s important with any system is that it makes sense, it’s consistent, and it solves the particular problem it was designed for.  The classification system in the sketch fails to do this.

When I used to work in public libraries, I discovered an interesting dilemma.  Traditionally, when you go to a library and search for life writing, you’ll find it at the end of the non-fiction, under 920.  But some libraries do it differently.  They put all the autobiographies and biographies away from the non-fiction, instead positioning them near the novels.

Why do they do this?

It’s because the kind of people who read novels are also the kind of people who read biographies and autobiographies.  They come to the library looking for stories, and both novels and life writing satisfy that desire.  The Dewey Decimal System may not do it that way, but these libraries are showing that it is acceptable to break the rules, if it makes sense to do so.

The big distinction we usually make is between books that contain facts (non-fiction) and those that contain made-up things (fiction).  But I wonder if a more important distinction would be between books that tell stories (narrative) and books that don’t (non-narrative).

In the former, you have:

• Dombey and Son
• Birthday Letters
• The Search
• Positively Happy
• The Field.

In the latter, there’s:

• How to Mind Map
• The Rough Guide to Devon and Cornwall
• Psychology: The Science of Mind and Behaviour
• Vauxhall/Opel Corsa Service and Repair Manual: 1997 to 2000.

What do you think?

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 outcome.

Even more troublesome are those works which present themselves as novels, yet feature real historical figures.

If we unpick this paragraph, we find a number of statements:

1. Sedgwick considers his book to be a work of fiction.
2. The novel is nevertheless based on real, historical events.
3. Sedgwick has consciously modified factual details in order to make a better story.
4. He has also used his imagination to fill in gaps in his knowledge.
5. He does not consider the work to be a biography.

It is points (3) and (4) that say the most.  They both refer to fictional components of the narrative, but they suggest two different reasons for the fiction.  In point (3), Sedgwick is admitting that, at times, he has deliberately told untruths, for the sake of the story.  This reminds me of James Frey’s response to allegations of dishonesty in A Million Little Pieces: “I’m only interested in making good art by whatever means.”  For Sedgwick and for Frey, then, the goal is to tell a good story, not to tell “the truth”.

In point (4), Sedgwick admits to doing what most biographers cannot help doing anyway: using his imagination as an occasional substitute for factual knowledge.

On this subject, I recommend John Worthen’s essay on ‘The Necessary Ignorance of a Biographer’, which discusses the way in which some biographers attempt to conceal their ignorance, making the facts available to them do more work so as to cover up the gaps in their knowledge.  By asserting his book’s status as fiction, Sedgwick essentially dodges the culpability suffered by most biographers in this regard.  Biographies have a responsibility to tell the truth, but in a novel, you can do what you like.

All of this reminds me of the question I keep on asking: why does it matter whether or not a story is factually true?  One answer to this question is that a text’s claim to truth (or otherwise) plays an important part.  People were offended by James Frey because A Million Little Pieces was presented as an autobiography, and – as we’ve seen – we bring to autobiographies an understanding that we’re going to read the truth.  It’s OK for a novelist to make things up, but it’s a betrayal for an autobiographer to do so.

For me, Sedgwick hasn’t really escaped the issue at all.  If anything, his ‘Author’s Note’ only highlights his own unease about the labels “fiction” and “biography” and the assumptions bound up with these terms.

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

As these books suggest, the re-telling works on the unconscious level – a storyeller doesn’t set out to copy, but he cannot help it.

Where does this leave so-called “authors” – people like me who try to originate, to invent new things, through stories?

It might be that Daniel Handler is onto something in Adverbs, where he makes his narrator suggest: “It is not the nouns. The miracle is the adverbs, the way things are done.”

You can’t tell a new story – you can’t change its basic elements.  But you can change the telling – the way the story is told.

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 decided “to overcome my disappointment by pretending I had indeed obtained and read them. The result is fiction.”

The book’s many reviewers obsess over the inherent ‘truth’ within:

“This is fiction, yet it is true” (Guardian);

“It may be fiction, but it’s also – convincingly, tragically and often exhilaratingly – real life” (Independent on Sunday).

Despite confessing to be ‘just’ a novel, the truth it conveys makes its readers want to describe it as something else. Perhaps the conventional division of fact/fiction is not, after all, as useful as it seems.

The subject of adoption carries much potential for poetry and autobiography alike.  In Peckham Blue (London: penned in the margins, 2006), Susie Gordon shows herself to be adept in both forms, employing the inherently ambiguous nature of poetry to explore the inevitably unstable sense of personal history arising from having been adopted.

Like many of the best auto/biographical works, Peckham Blue actually consists of two narratives.  On the one hand there is the story that Gordon uses her imagination to reconstruct: the story of the father she will never meet, and his life in South London.  But she also tells us the story of the story, recounting her journey to Peckham to retrace his steps.  ‘Photographs’ is an account of a meeting with her aunt in which Gordon’s sense of the past consists of what she can glean from pictures.  It is a detached account, where the only details we are offered are physical: “everyone with mullets, jackets with big collars”.  Gordon seems aware that photographs do not offer the full story, showing instead “holidays and flings and one-time friends”.  This is, perhaps, not the narrative she wants to know about.  On the facing page we find ‘Wedding Day’, a reconstruction which goes beyond photographs, telling the story as Gordon imagines it.

The emotional charge of the collection comes largely from the opposition between physical proximity, as the poet treads the same ground as her father, and temporal distance, as she ultimately shows that her reaching back in time to this unknown character is a feat of the imagination rather than a physical reality.  This interplay is present from the outset, when Gordon describes her experience of walking into Peckham from the station for the first time:

He walked this way and stepped these streets,
treading thumb-pressed fag ends underneath his feet
years before I came here.

The idea of retreading her father’s steps is repeated throughout the collection.  By the time we reach ‘On Peckham Rye’, the penultimate poem, the sense of distance from her father has become yearning – “I want to walk beside him here (…) two reflections making clear that he is with me, I with him” – as Gordon walks alone on Peckham Rye, “past windows that once gave out his reflection”.  Here, she is not simply treading the same ground as her father: she is almost a substitute for him, since it is now her reflection that is seen in the windows.

Despite all the photographs she is shown and stories she is told, Gordon’s most compelling depictions of her father come from her own imagination, which in this particular narrative must substitute for real memories:

He’s smoking a Marlboro
in the photograph I’ve seen,
but in my mind’s eye it’s a roll-up.

This difference between reality as documented by photographs and what Gordon’s “mind’s eye” can see serves as a reminder that her own imaginary narrative is the only one she will be able to tell with conviction.  The poem ‘A Cigarette with my Father’ enforces the unstable nature of such a narrative, in which she imagines the man either “rattling down the last of his second neat whisky” or “drowning his moustache stubble in Guinness froth”, but is unable to decide between the two.  Like Jon McGregor’s novel, So Many Ways to Begin, the collection explores multiple possibilities, seemingly conscious throughout that whatever stories we are told can only be imagined, constructed, not remembered.  In a moving conclusion to the poem, Gordon imagines “how it might have been / if things had gone his way”, and depicts herself as a baby “on a mild Catford day, / looking up and seeing smoke from his cigarette / blooming in the air as he rattled some toy above me”.  This imagined, alternative memory seems to indicate the start of a coherent developmental narrative – a child’s earliest memory, perhaps, or a moment influencing her later development.  Imagination again provides a substitute for reality, which can offer no such coherence.

But the collection does more than simply reiterate ideas about lost origins.  The South London landscape is recognisable, and she namedrops locations (Peckham Rye, Blackheath Common, Brixton, Bellingham) in much the same way as “Every street in those postcodes / is x-marked with my aunt’s rememberings”.  This is also a tale, then, of Gordon’s attempt to know “this place that would have been home”, and “the spread of grubby plantains” on Peckham Rye contrast powerfully with “the windy seafront” of the Lancashire coast, where Gordon grew up.  In many senses, this work is about exile: indeed, the poet repeatedly uses her own sense of exile as a means of fusing her experience with that of her father.  It is also with an outsider’s eyes that Gordon sees Peckham and its environs, and her depictions of the suburbs are valuable for that very reason.

Perhaps I am moved by this collection most of all because of its autobiographical value: we can never know exactly how we are influenced by our parents, but nevertheless I have always been privileged with a story of origins to tell myself.  This work explores what happens when that story is fragmented or unclear, and I feel that poetry, which often presents ambiguity, paradox and instability, is the perfect medium in which to do so.  Gordon’s writing also benefits from its understatement: far from melodramatic, it plays its emotional cards wisely, turning them over perhaps when one is least prepared.  It is a subtle, moving, and vibrant collection: an artful piece of poetry and a compelling autobiography.