Book Review: Shy: A Memoir by Sian Prior

An attractive, forty-something woman peers around a gallery, trying vainly to find her partner in the buzzing party crowd. ‘A familiar sensation was sweeping through my body’, Sian Prior writes. ‘It was as if someone had spiked my drink so that instead of sparkling mineral water I was now sipping a kind of effervescent cement’. Unable to spot a familiar face, she starts to sweat and her stomach churns. Alight with panic she flees the party, not even recognising the ‘calm, confident blonde woman’ she glimpses in a mirror on the way out.

Prior, a successful arts journalist, choir master, public speaker and media consultant, suffers from crippling shyness. But this Renaissance woman is also a published author and writing teacher, and the incident jolts her into an exploration of the paradox of her life – that someone so comfortable in the public spotlight could also be felled by terror in unstructured social situations.

That paradox makes this book unique. Its author was born to tell her own story of shyness because her professional persona is the perfect vehicle for spreading the message.

Shy is no conventional memoir, but nor is it a self-help book. Prior ditches a chronological account of her life and replaces it with a panoply of elements – interviews with psychologists (including her own mother, Margot) and her own research; playful lists; play-offs between incidents from her past and theories of shyness – to present a frank account that is often funny, sometimes poignant and always engaging.

Although the result can feel anarchic at times, it works beautifully; experience and vivid recollection step in where the research evidence is simplistic, suggesting both the strengths and weaknesses of scientific definitions.

To cope with the shyness she has battled all along, Prior developed a persona she calls ‘Professional Sian’ – a confident, polished performer who knows how to fake it till she makes it.

But ‘Shy Sian’ surfaces when there is no script, no structure. And for Prior this has meant a lifetime of lost social and romantic opportunities  – from Sally, the school friend round the corner who the young Sian is too scared to visit, to ‘the beautiful dark-eyed boy glimpsed in the stairwell of my first high school’. She has missed out not just on sex but ‘the subtle semaphore of attraction’.

For Prior, shyness is as much about fearful thoughts – what she calls the ‘what ifs’ – as it is about the intensely discomfiting physical symptoms: ‘armpits drenched, throat clenched, locked in battle with myself’. While travelling in Europe in her twenties, Prior develops a stubborn throat lump: ‘Lying on my hostel bunk in the night I would feel it resting there, nuzzling at my vocal cords’.

There is a central narrative here that anchors Prior’s account to the recent past. For ten years she lived with the musician Paul Kelly (whom Prior calls Tom in the book) – an Australia folk hero, one of our national bards. She reveals their slow-burning courtship, which blossomed into a shared life, and the cocooning effect of this relationship on her sense of self.

Her relationship with Tom and other life experiences are held up to the light to examine what shyness isn’t as much as what it is. Is it genetic? What is its relationship to social phobia? Is it the same as introversion, or can a shy person be an extrovert? How does Tom’s fame relate to Prior’s own contradictory stance towards being in the spotlight? Is shyness related to hypersensitivity? She explores the positive character traits that go with shyness, like empathy, conscientiousness and a willingness to listen.

Then the unthinkable happens and Tom announces he is leaving. Suddenly the very rejection that all shy people fear has come to pass.

Upheaval follows, but it is viewed in the light of a formative childhood event – deepening the examination of the origins of shyness in ways that take it far beyond the biological.

Prior’s writing is fresh, visual, funny. She has a sharp recall of the quotidian detail but also the insight and hard-won wisdom of someone who has battled to live a socially and emotionally fulfilling life in the midst of a sometimes crippling fear.

Yet there is something implicit in this book that Prior herself doesn’t pay much attention to. Given the rise of positive psychology, I looked for the protective factors that enabled Prior to seek out significant relationships and pursue professional success.

Without diminishing her pain, I was also interested in the class aspects of her success – her psychologist mother is an obvious factor, as is her immersion in the world of classical music and love affair with the clarinet. But what about schooling – was a private school, with its small class sizes and individualised attention, a strengthening influence?

Prior, intent on exploring a trait that has been hidden and denied in her public life, seems mostly oblivious to these broader questions, although two things stand out that will be useful to anyone who is shy. ‘Professional Sian’ first came into being because Prior was able to find, in a high-profile environmental job, a cause far larger than her own insecurities. She also singles out a passionate curiosity about other people and the world as an incentive to push past her fears.

In public appearances since writing the book, Prior has discussed how risky it felt to break the illusion of her professional competence by publishing Shy. While her discoveries did not lead to the cure she originally hoped for, they have enabled a new-found acceptance, and Prior claims she is no longer embarrassed to be shy.

While Prior’s level of professional success may seem out of reach to many of us shy people, I found this encouraging rather than dispiriting. I suspect most of us have our own version of Professional Sian, and although she may not be as reliable or fearless as Prior’s version, this writer offers a bold role model for risk taking and a path to self-acceptance that many readers will benefit from.

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The Return of the Muse: How Poetry Came Back to Me after Fifteen Years

Erato, Muse of Lyrical Poetry by Charles Meynier

I've been putting off writing my next blog entry – it was going to be about dancing in the lounge, a habit I've taken up this year, and I was reluctant to conjure images of myself cavorting around the room behind the closed venetians, arms flailing about, to the sound of 'Papa don't preach'. Now, thank the gods, I have something else to write about so you don't have to imagine that – instead you can picture me in a room full of drunkards, wannabes and has-beens, reading out my latest poetic gems on a bad microphone, legs shaking, head full of narcissistic enthusiasm.

After fifteen years lurking in the most obscure recesses of my unconscious, my muse has returned to the fold. And boy is she making up for lost time.

I wrote poetry in the 1990s, and even got a few of them published, but I never cracked the big journals. I was shadowed by the fact that a friend of mine was one of Australia's most significant poets. I followed her style religiously, as well as that of the poet I was writing my Masters thesis on, Frank O'Hara.

Then a few things happened. I met the love of my life, and spurned him. I studied editing and became a freelance editor. My brain became increasingly attuned to the nuances of prose, and I learned how to cut language short, to discipline and control long and waffly sentences. Somewhere along the way the tap of my poetry simply turned off. It was more or less gone. When I tried to write 'poetically' it came out as the most horribly strangled prose.

Now I look back at my earlier poetic 'career' and realise something very important. The immaturity that was a feature of my earlier life, and that I still battle, stymied my writing in ways I was completely unaware of. Already I am becoming a better poet than I was then, because I'm practising every single day and my mind is much more open to a wide range of influences.

Back then, the only poems that I ever finished were the ones that had tumbled out more or less whole, with only the need to edit – I did attend writing workshops and got great feedback from my poet friend, but I'm talking about fiddling around with something already more or less complete. There are many worthwhile ideas that come out as small fragments, or even different entities that you can combine. You have to morph these bits and pieces into poems by worrying at them, revisiting them like an anxious nurse, turning them over in your brain and letting your unconscious fill in the blanks. This is the kind of work I only did occasionally fifteen years ago. Who knows how many good ideas I threw away because they required digging, when all I knew how to do was pan for gold.

The other thing I didn't do then is read as obsessively and singlemindedly as I do now. Naturally when I was writing my thesis I read the higgledy-piggledy band of poets that influenced Frank O'Hara and that was certainly wide. And I was already familiar with the confessional poets – Plath and Lowell from school (who could forget Plath's 'Daddy' or lines of Lowell's like 'My mind's not right' ('Skunk hour') and 'Crows maunder on the petrified fairway' ('Waking in the blue')) and later Sexton. Yet I was a bit snobby and with some exceptions, poetry that wasn't surreal or postmodern enough didn't really interest me. Now I'm a happy mongrel and will read anything I think is any good.

I'm no poetic genius. That sounds if there was a possibility I could be but what I mean is I'm okay with that now. I'm okay with being one of the masses who has to slog away at something to get good at it, or just better. Perhaps that was another reason why my poetry stalled before stopping altogether – I didn't really understand how to apply myself, even though I read poetry a lot. I didn't know how to follow a thread of experience, or to trust my own perceptions. My poetry was shallow and playful because I couldn't express my own life, I couldn't be a witness to it.

And I'm already harvesting the fruits of slog. I can see a noticeable improvement in quality, sometimes from one poem to the next. I can read poems I was writing weeks ago, days ago, and see clearly that they just don't come up to scratch. But it's also clear that it was necessary to write them to reach the current stage. Even more strange, some of my recent, relatively strong poems bear cadences from weaker poems from fifteen years ago. Experiments are never wasted, because their lessons are unconsciously applied to later work. What alchemy! What magic!

The trick now is to keep that inner life alive while also ensuring the outer life is whole. Keep up exercise. Keep going to Grow. Keep trying to get more work. I have to stay in the world.

My major challenge: time. No longer can I waste it, yet poetry needs time for the brain to simply waft with no object or aim.

As I read the work of poets that I didn't have the patience or attention span to stay with a few years ago, the importance of reading beyond poetry becomes evident. Poets devour history, biography, the classics; they refer constantly to myth.

Yet this doesn't mean intellectual snobbery. Quite the opposite. Every perception has the potential to contribute to a poem. Nothing is wasted, therefore the attention must be on everything. Poets are not vague, romantic idiots. They observe the world keenly, sharply, with an eye for the finest of details. They are, of all things, journalists! Just much more careful journos than those you will find on the pages of broadsheets like The Guardian, because they identify and note what too often remains invisible and unexpressed.

Which reminds me – that newspaper, whose online version fell last year on the parched Australian media landscape like a cooling shower, recently published a very nasty little article pooh-poohing a poem by the much-maligned young Twilight star Kristen Stewart.

Okay, so the title is terrible and the first paragraph not much chop but there are some great lines in the rest of it. Damn the Guardian for being so snobbish and a tad misogynistic into the bargain (how dare a vacuous female Hollywood star believe she could write something decent!). But us poets had the last laugh – the poem got a much fairer assessment from Professor Brian Kim Stefans of UCLA, and being compared to Bernadette Mayer and Antonin Artaud is no mean feat. I'll concur with the professor's encouraging line 'I say go for it Ms. Stewart'. 

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Book News

Here’s an update of my publishing adventures ...

I’ve now published a book about Birthday Depression! It makes no claims to cure it, doesn’t tell readers to just get over it. Instead it offers some keys to understanding, and perhaps even benefiting from it – looking beyond the balloons and streamers of the ‘celebration’ to what’s really going on underneath.

The book is available to US readers,  UK readers and now there is a separate Amazon Australia site.  (There are also several other country sites but too many to list.) 

Unfortunately at the moment if you’re buying in Australia, you can’t click to see the book on the Australian site – have a look inside on the US or the UK sites.

My memoir now has a review! The reviewer gave it five stars which is extremely gratifying.

Of course this is exciting but I want to reiterate that I am interested in getting a wide range of feedback about the book. I do not expect every reader to have the same reaction to it.

I’ve also updated the memoir – it now has a new title and blurb.

If you don’t have an ereader, don’t despair. You can download free Kindle apps for your tablet, smart phone or computer (PC or Mac).

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Slightly Nutty Uploads New Book Cover

Exciting news - I've given my blog compilation a new cover!

These blog entries have all been lovingly edited and cleaned up and handpicked for your delectation.

Okay, well perhaps more exciting things have happened in the world. But I did the cover all by myself, and with a photo sourced from the creative commons, no less.

Oh I hate selling. I am not good at it. It goes against the very fibre of my being, unless I am selling for someone else.

You can buy it here. Or here if you're in the UK. Find out more about it here. Okay I'm out of here.

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Fractious Fifty Year Old in a Flurry of Flight

I didn’t get around to writing a birthday post this year. Partly because I have written one every year, trying everyone’s patience in the process, partly because the birthday itself was manageable. If you are having trouble with birthday depression, blog about it!

So the birthday itself was fine, apart from spending literally – I kid you not – up to three hours online finding the right restaurant: a recently opened Middle Eastern place in South Caulfield, nearish to home. It was worth the time spent – the place made up for its pretty basic ambience by being right in terms of food, location and price. Everyone was happy and I got to eat enough hommous and falafel to last me to my sixtieth birthday.

This was the restaurant. I would go back there in a jiffy.

Did I mention it was my fiftieth? Turning fifty is a bit special, what I mean is other people think it is. Sisters who don’t normally buy you anything leave birthday cards with money in them. Aunties you rarely see send cards or express a desire to see you. Wishes are expressed to see you blowing out birthday candles surrounded by the nephews and nieces.

I wonder if fifty is in some ways the biggest milestone of all. Half a bl—dy century – how amazing is that? Just to have survived that long, to be honest, feels like an achievement. Am I biased? Have I just enjoyed the attention too much? Part of me wants to rest on my laurels, to sit back and from my venerable age hand down my matchless wisdom to the younger ones.

But a post-fifty scramble is upon me.

Fifty is the time when you realise that the ‘now’ that you constantly revile, fight with, curse, try to come to terms with, forgive and generally are up against will change, is itself impermanent. Behind the scenes, the crew are arranging for a change of props, while the writer is preparing new calamities for the melodramatic heroine. The invisible/visible event of old age is looming, and rather than having a mid-life crisis (isn’t everyone in the West in an ongoing mid-life crisis after the age of twenty-eight?) I’m experiencing more of a mid-life scramble. There is so much to do and I am staring into the abyss of my mortality. Hurry! Hurry! life urges me. Like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, there’s no time to waste.

The New York poet Frank O’Hara adopted Lewis’s white rabbit  much earlier than I. In a journal he kept at the tender age of 22, he wrote: ‘one must hurry, one must avoid the impediments, snares, detours ... I’ve a long long way to go, and I’m late already.’ I understand how he felt.

Is this why I've published four ebooks on Amazon and am in the middle of a fifth? Like a woman who keeps having babies one after another, then has to stop and settle down and look after the ones she has, writing another book gives me an excuse for not marketing the completed ones. So the one I’m writing now, I promise myself, will be the last for a long while. And I promise not to unduly harangue my long-suffering blog readers too much* about these books; I have, or am preparing or resurrecting, separate websites or blogs for three of them, possibly four.

All this work is self-created, is really a hobby, and by definition shouldn’t be stressful. My paid work with clients should come first. So when I get too panicky about this I tell myself that it’s something I just started doing because I had too much time on my hands, that it is a skill-development thing, and that any success or otherwise is not the main issue.

Paid work must come first. I want more of it, and I must get myself out there to get it. More panic.

This scramble is partly because the drugs are kicking in and I’m able to do more. But my energies feel all over the place, I’m having trouble prioritising. In fact, I even wrote a new poem while sitting in front of the tele the other day, and have just sent it and a few others off to a poetry journal. Submitting work to a literary journal is so much less effort than it used to be in the days before email. If I’m knocked back, which is likely, I’ll be disappointed but not devastated.

Equally frustrating is of course that my hang-ups are still holding me back – that in fact there is still an angry fifteen-year-old inside waiting to get out, not to mention an attention-hungry five-year-old, and both will do anything in order to get attention. And I’m still very isolated, apart from the self-help group I attend and seeing the odd friend. The group is still a huge challenge for me – I will blog about it soon.

I bet anyone reading this blog from a mental health perspective is quietly shaking their heads and mouthing the word ‘manic’. (I’m not bipolar as far I know, but my SSRI does make me a bit high during the day, with a downer at night.) But when you come up for air after a long period you want to snatch at life while the mood lasts. You don’t know how long it will be before you get pulled down again. Oh those big gulps of air! I’ll breathe them in while I can.

* I said ‘too much’ – there’ll be a bit of skiting but I’ll keep it under control.

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A Few of My Favourite Sayings

Some aspects of getting older are boringly predictable. You find yourself, like generations past, lamenting the language young people use – the poor grammar, the ridiculous sayings, the odd pronunciations. It puts things in perspective to realise that the Ancient Greeks had a similar complaint; the poet Hesiod, thought to have been active between 650 and 750 BC, railed about the ‘frivolous youth of today’.

I sound like on an old fuddy-duddy. Does anyone use that expression any more? As part of my editing work I recently watched a video of kids in a classroom reading out loud together the story of the billy goats Gruff. The wicked troll yells to the goats ‘Be off with you!’ I found myself pleased that the kids were being exposed to this quaint expression.

Anyway I was not going to spend this entry complaining. Except for one use of ‘like’ I hate and probably everyone my age does too: ‘like’ instead of ‘said’, as in:

She’s, like, ‘He’s not my boyfriend any more.’

And I’m like, ‘Since when?’

I don’t like ‘like’ in this context because it makes speech unnecessarily drawn out, clumsy and difficult.

Why not use ‘said’ or, if you want more immediacy, ‘she says’? Even, if you must, ‘she goes?’ Both trip off the tongue.

I had to get that out of my system. The main thing I want to talk about is sayings I actually, like, like. And interestingly, many of these come from the USA, so often decried for spreading  grammatical no-nos (‘lay’ instead of ‘lie’, not saying ‘of’ after ‘couple’, removing ‘-ed’ from participle adjectives like ‘old fashioned’ and ‘cliched’ so they become nouns, eg ‘a cliche piece of writing’, ‘an old-fashion girl’ – okay, no more complaining). (I hope my US blog readers will forgive this outburst, which I’ve needed to get out of my system for some time – there are many things about US English I prefer, eg ‘jail’ instead of ‘gaol’.)

So here’s my list of favourite sayings for your linguistic delectation:

Here’s the thing.

Why do I love this so much? It’s incredibly economical, not to mention understated. There’s also a bit of empathy in it.

It says, in only three words, ‘That’s all true, but there’s another factor that trumps all that, and I’m about to tell you what it is.’ It’s a polite yet unassuming signpost that prepares the listener for what comes next. What’s not to love? (This latter saying is something I’m not crazy about, but I don’t hate it either.)

Moving right along ...

I have always loved this expression, ever since I first heard it said in first year uni by a friend of mine. Again, it’s very economical but with some very low-key humour in there. It basically says ‘What we’re talking about is a bit embarrassing so let’s drop the subject.’ But this ‘translation’ doesn’t begin to describe the essence of this phrase, which has a dramatic performative quality that is humorous but not so easy to deconstruct. I think of an overanxious teacher in front of a classroom of students with their ears wagging at some salacious reference, and the teacher saying brightly ‘moving right along, does anyone know how to  ...’ There’s a note of panic, of let’s-get-out-of-here-before-we-get-tripped-up, a hint of awkwardness in the face of dauntingly  sexual[?] overtones. But users of this phrase are not usually as embarrassed as the teacher; rather, they’re ironically performing the teacher role, implying ‘I may be in fact a little embarrassed at what I’ve just said but I will laugh at my own embarrassment.’ Despite the postmodern complexity, this expression manages to be fun and lighthearted.

The ego has landed.

This is a pun on the title of a bestselling book, The Eagle Has Landed, a war thriller by Jack Higgins. I’m like a child with some humorous sayings – no matter how many times I hear or say them, I still find them vaguely funny, and this is no exception. Applied to anyone with an inflated sense of self-worth, its humour lies in its applicability to that particular individual, so there’s a freshness to the saying each time. Most recently I found myself thinking it when watching a documentary about an English plastic surgeon, originally from Pakistan, who was returning there to do some altruistic cosmetic surgery on the faces of female victims of battery acid attacks. Much as I admired this man it was clear from the first frame that he was, as we say in the Antipodes, ‘up himself’ (a saying I’m also very fond of). As usual I found  it funny to pronounce ‘the ego has landed’ about this man, despite his kindness. The present tense of ‘has landed’ gives the expression a drama and immediacy that I really like.

You don’t care for that.

Ah, how I love this one. I first noticed it as something distinctively American in a memoir written by one of my favourite authors. It was in a piece of dialogue between the author and her very empathic psychiatrist. She is revelling in a heightened mood during a bipolar episode and doesn’t want to come down to Earth: he’s trying to convince her to take her mental health seriously. It’s old-fashioned and euphemistic – instead of saying ‘don’t like’ or the stronger ‘hate’ or ‘despise’ etc,  you say ‘don’t care for’.

Why is this euphemism attractive to me and not simply annoying? Because of the word ‘care’ perhaps? Or the fact that regardless of whom the subject of the sentence is, I, you or a third person, there’s a charmingly old-fashioned delicacy and politeness to it? It seems to want to spare the listener rather than, as in the case of ‘moving right along’, the speaker. It refers to a sensibility that can discriminate, and is discerning: what we do or don’t care for being what we like and dislike (or, I suppose, care about).

The young – always with us

I couldn’t find this on Google – apart from the more general ‘always with us’ – which upset me a bit because if I can’t find something on Google I tend to think I’ve made it up. For some reason I’ve always assumed that this old-fashioned expression is British. If that’s so, it expresses what is a cliche of various aspects of the traditional British sensibility – an acceptance of adversity combined with a difficulty in enjoying life.  There is a resigned tone to this saying, but also, importantly, a radical acceptance. I can almost see a middle-aged woman in a flowery hat and with one of those rectangular sixties handbags hanging off her arm sighing as she says it. It could be in response to just about anything – a child acting up, or a teenager being too boisterous or simply saying something funny or striking. It is not a complaint but an observation that has something of the long-suffering about it as well as a subtle sense of a close community, and one that is headed by its elders.

I have it.

Okay, so this expression may seem so incredibly inane that its inclusion is incomprehensible. Bear with me. This is a US saying; Australians say 'I've got it' instead. This is an ugly expression, hard on the ear. How infinitely more elegant is 'I have it'! Give me that any day. Once you've given it to me, I can say 'I have it'.

There are plenty of other expressions I’m vaguely fond of but none that tickle my fancy like these ones do. Readers are more than welcome to send in their favourite expressions, and to pick my grammar apart and highlight any errors!

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Writing a Memoir: Tips for Bypassing the Inner Censor

When you’re figuring out how to write a memoir, it’s sometimes easy to get caught up in the mechanics. Of course these are important. But unless your memoir is primarily factual in nature, getting to the emotional core of the story – the most profound version of what really happened – is vital if you want your writing to be compelling.

But how do you do this? I’ve written in the past about the challenge of finding your memoir voice. Your unconscious mind may be prey to all sorts of strictures about telling the truth that you’re not aware of. You may have an inner censor that metaphorically blacks out your most intense memories.

Yet this censor is often asleep on the job, and it may not be difficult to get past them. Below are some tips for doing just that.

Mind’s eye

Sometimes your inner censor is only working on the level of the writing itself, and not your actual recollections. It may be that you’re easily able to picture and remember whatever you were feeling at the time of the event you’re writing about, but somehow the link between this internal state and the writing process is missing.

You need to be conscious of the gap before you can bridge it.

As an exercise, start writing about a memory. As you write, focus on what is present in your mind’s eye. Does your subject matter accord with the picture in your mind’s eye? If so, chances are you’re in touch with what was really going on emotionally at the time.

If there is a discrepancy between the two, start to explore this inner picture. Ask yourself the following:

Which room or environment are you picturing? Why is this room significant?

What are the feelings or thoughts that circulate around this mental image? Can you put them into words?

Sometimes there’s a delay between completing a piece of writing and being aware of the underlying emotions that accompanied the original experience. You may complete the writing and only later become aware of a deeper layer of feeling and experience. Try to capture this deeper layer in words as soon as it comes up, and use this later writing to enhance what you’ve already completed.

Studying photos

Photos are a great way of jogging memory and unearthing perceptions about the past.

One option is to find a photo that appeals to you, study it, and start to write freely about anything that comes to mind. Think about what was happening around the time the photo was taken, and what the underlying dynamics were. If you're writing about relatives, a photo that appeals to your imagination can spark a search for more information.

Another option is to keep a photo nearby, or in your mind’s eye, as you write, as a general reminder of the subject matter. In this case you're not so concerned about whatever is going on in the photo, but of the individual character of the people that feature in it. Whether the photo is of you alone, family members or other significant people, use it to help you retain a strong sense of the character, emotional burdens, or general circumstances of those you're writing about.

Perceptions on waking

One of the times we’re most vulnerable to unconscious thoughts and memories is when we first wake up in the morning.

Sometimes a deeper layer of perception or emotion may reveal itself in a dream, or simply as a general impression when you wake. Keep a pen and paper or writing device next to the bed to capture these impressions, or alternatively write about them as soon as you get to the computer in the morning.

If you enjoyed this blog entry, you might also like Haunted by the Ghosts of Memory: Is Memoir Writing Good Therapy?

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Memoir Writing: How to Find Your Voice as a Writer

Writing a memoir sets you on an inner voyage of discovery. At the end of it you’re almost bound to know yourself much better than you do at the start.

A vital key to writing a successful memoir is finding your voice as a writer. The irony is that you may have to listen to many other voices before your own comes through.

Your authorial voice is an organic thing that makes your writing unique. But how to unearth it successfully differs from person to person.

Some lucky people simply start to write, and the voice of their earlier self suddenly bubbles up and they simply channel it. For others it’s not so easy. When you start to write, there are likely to be psychological restrictions you’re unaware of: parental dictums to be polite; fear of hurting or embarrassing family members; the restrictions imposed by well-meaning teachers; even the sense of what is syntactically correct can all interfere with voice.

One way to get the flow going is to read lots of different memoirs. I’ve read hundreds of memoirs by now and they’ve all helped to put me in writing mode.

Reading other memoirs can provide permission. ‘She dared say that!’ you think, and a hidden part of you that has been crouching in the attic of your psyche for years, ignored or reviled, starts to stretch and parade herself. And there are things she’s desperate to tell you.

Like how you really felt when you moved house at the age of nine. And why you stopped dancing classes at the age of twelve. And who you really had a crush on, even though they weren’t at all cool. This disowned self is far more interesting and subversive than you realise and if you let her speak she may give your writing a force and immediacy that might otherwise be lacking.

When I first started writing it became apparent after a while that I was repressing the most interesting and subversive parts of the narrative. I would describe the event and then find myself mentally rehearsing something I hadn’t thought interesting enough to include. Hmmm. Over a period of time it became clear that the most interesting things were the things that I didn’t want to look at.

Good writing is about bravery. It’s about daring to look. Experiencing the feelings again is likely to be painful. But the pain won’t last. The record will.

When I consider voice, I find myself also looking at style, tone and language. Perhaps voice is the combination of these, powered by the essence of the narrative self who is the subject of the memoir.

When you read other memoirs, take note of the tone, as that is a key aspect of voice. Tone can range widely from highly emotional to melodramatic, from blackly humorous to cheerful or self-contained (and can also be a combination of any of these).

Also important is language, which also varies depending on the aims of the writer. For example, you can use language to bring the reader closer to the emotion or distance them from it. Language combines with tone to tell the reader who the narrator is, what life stage they’re at, and how much distance they have from the subject matter.

Two stand-out memoirists

Out of all the many possible examples of memoirists I want to choose two that illuminate voice. Both are excellent writers yet their styles are in  sharp contrast, at either end of two extremes.

In Borrowed Finery, Paula Fox (above) writes about a horrific childhood in small, jewel-like vignettes that have a haiku quality about them. They are highly visual recollections that together make up what one admiring reviewer called  ‘a montage of scenes and epiphanies’.

Fox was abandoned by her feckless parents at birth, and passed around from person to person, sometimes finding temporary sanctuaries, often not. In writing her memoir she seems to have stuck to the rule: ‘thou shalt not wallow’. There is little sentiment here and no self-pity. There is a sense of someone surviving sufficiently to retain the observer self, who notices the unique detail and stores it for later. 

Whether a restrained style is right for you will depend on your strengths as a writer and your subject matter. If you want to write with drama and urgency, you’ve got to read Marya Horbacher (pictured at top). She’s written two outstanding memoirs, Wasted: A Memoir of Bulimia and Anorexia and Madness: A Bipolar Life. The first details a near-fatal eating disorder that Hornbacher developed at the age of nine; the second her experience of, and coming to terms with, a severe form of bipolar disorder. Hornbacher’s work is fast-paced, highly dramatic and a miracle of immediacy. She is a lyrical writer from whom the words seem to pour. 

Hornbacher’s work is also noteworthy because, especially in Wasted, she combines an intellectual and at times scholarly approach with a highly vernacular, heightened and poetic style. A chaotic, free-for-all quality accompanies the powerful imagery and strong narrative drive.

There are occasional drawbacks to both styles. Fox has deliberately stripped emotion from her writing; Borrowed Finery  is almost an essay protesting the misery memoir genre. At the same time it occasionally becomes a little frustrating to read because you don’t get much of a back story (or a sense of Fox’s adult life – perhaps a sequel is required).

And while Hornbacher is brilliant, quixotic, un-put-downable, at times the reader feels trapped in the narrator’s hellish world and, especially in the earlier work, her self-destructive tendencies (of course, involuntarily identifying with the writer’s experience is a sign of good writing and probably what Hornbacher intended).

Neither of these memoirists is ‘wrong’. Far from it. Both have sought and found the voice that’s right for them.

Are you struggling to find your memoir voice? Which writers have helped you?

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Killing Your Darlings: How to Delete Material from a Manuscript without Tears

When you’re working on an extended piece of writing, whether it’s a novel, memoir or other form of non-fiction, editing is one of the most important and painful tasks. Hard as it is to face, much of what we write has to be ultimately turfed, chucked out, trashed. Whatever word you use, it’s all the same – it won’t belong in the piece. It will interrupt the flow, confound the narrative, or have the wrong tone.

Information on the practical aspects of editing your work is widely available, but it doesn’t make the emotional part any easier. Knowing a piece of copy isn’t right doesn’t make it any easier to cut out.

But it’s not all bad news. You don’t actually have to trash what doesn’t belong. In fact, there are many options for putting it to a completely new use. Below are some suggestions.

Store deleted text in a separate file. Don’t simply delete the text you need to discard. Create a file with a name that makes it easily identifiable, eg ‘Copy deleted from memoir’. Cut and paste any deleted copy into that, separating each piece of text with a line break. Even if you never use the copy, you’ll have a record of it. In the case of a memoir, you’ll retain scenes that have emotional resonance for you. View these scenes as the textual equivalent of the deleted movie scenes sometimes included on DVDs as extras – worthwhile revisiting for their own sake.

Make different versions of your manuscript. If you complete a draft of your manuscript before making major structural changes, you’ll probably have a strong level of emotional involvement with the earlier draft. In the case of a memoir this may be particularly strong because the earlier draft may include more information about your life, and what made you the person you became, than the later one. Retain two versions of the manuscript: the long version and the edited version. Publish the shorter version to rave reviews(!) and keep the long version as a record for your personal archive.

Repurpose text to create a new piece of writing. Deleted copy could become the basis for a new story, article, poem, play or blog entry, or perhaps a whole book!

A description of an eccentric relative or a significant trip could become the basis for an article that is published in a newspaper, magazine or journal, whether in hard copy or online. (This could be used as valuable publicity for your published book, as the bio that would accompany your piece would mention your book).

A descriptive line from a novel could become the inspiration for a poem.

A real-life incident that had to be cut from a memoir could become the basis for a short story, play or novel.

Alternatively, it might be the starting-point for a second memoir dealing with aspects of your life the first one didn’t. Augusten Burroughs, the acclaimed author of Running with Scissors, has now written a total of six memoirs, including three collections of stories from his life. Kathryn Harrison, author of acclaimed memoir The Kiss, has completed three memoirs and a book that is a combination of memoir and travelogue. (She has also published six novels, some of which deal with the lives of her maternal grandparents.)

Condense the copy and use it somewhere else. You don’t always have to explain everything in detail. Sometimes a paragraph or scene contains information that has value for readers but could be expressed more succinctly. My memoir originally included a scene in which my sister and I were taunted by a group of non-Catholic schoolchildren on the way to school. I deleted the scene because it wasn’t pivotal and made the memoir too lengthy, but its emotional import remains in the line ‘Would they laugh in my face when I cried, like the state school kids laughed?’

Describe your experiences of editing when you publicise your book. Readers are fascinated with the process of constructing an extended piece of writing. As well as the technical aspects, they’re curious about the emotional ups and downs that come with the territory, and the ways in which the writing impacts on real life. If you’re giving author talks to publicise your book, discussing what you took out (or left out) of your book and why, and the process of editing in general, can be rewarding for readers. It can also be the basis of an article itself – as this blog entry testifies!

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