Ben Hoare - Storytelling & Serial Autobiography

Big Brother isn’t boring (or maybe it is)

June 7th, 2008

The only thing I’m finding boring about Big Brother as it begins its ninth full series is the debate about whether or not it’s boring.
As I read Cilla Black’s thoughts in the Metro this week and recognise echoes from elsewhere, I think of that other dull debate that surfaces every year: what Christmas is all [...]

Keeping an idiot in suspense

May 27th, 2008

My previous blog post, dated April 14 2008, finishes: “I like this theory. It ties in with an idea I have been playing with recently. I’ll tell you more about that tomorrow.”
Since then, I’ve written nothing for this website.
It reminded me of an old joke - “How do you keep an idiot in suspense? [...]

The cult of the self

April 14th, 2008

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 [...]

Photographs and memory

April 13th, 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 myself [...]

Fiction, but true

April 12th, 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 decided [...]