Who owns the facts of our lives? We would hope, of course, that we own our own. Only we, as individuals, have lived in our skins, seen through our eyes, felt with our hearts and touched with our hands. But does that mean we know ourselves truthfully and well? Are our own versions of ourselves more accurate and reliable than another’s version of us?

These questions are exercising my mind of late as I begin the messy work of writing a family memoir. I have to confess I am not completely untroubled by this, by what I have set out to do. There are, I am sure, some in my family – living and dead – who would prefer that I put down my pen at once, leave well enough alone, respect the privacy of those who do not have the privilege of power that the pen holds.

It is a tetchy business, this. What right do I have, really? Some would say they own the facts of their lives and I have no right to steal, borrow or bend them.

But I’m not sure about the ownership issue. For better or worse, everyone takes some kind of possession of the facts of our lives from the moment we are born. As soon as someone observes us, we are interpreted, described, packaged and re-made in the image of the beholder. We are never, as Garbo pleaded for herself, left alone. We are examined, analysed, commented upon, criticised, praised, revised, re-made.

I am writing a memoir about some events in the life of my mother. The events are extraordinary and even now, some sixty years later, the effects of them are also extraordinary, cascading down through generations. I listen to the stories and the memories of aunties, cousins, brothers, my sister, my father: all these sentences plaiting together to make a rich braid. But it isn’t complete: my mother’s version isn’t here. She died eight years ago, and the truth is that she would not, I think, have told me her version anyway. She rarely talked about the events I’m so curious about; she would have discouraged me from writing them.

She would have agreed with the writer Janet Malcolm, who describes the biographer as like ‘the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewellery and the money, and triumphantly bearing away his loot’. According to Malcolm, biography is a collusion between writer and reader in an ‘excitingly forbidden undertaking: tiptoeing down the corridor together, to stand in front of the bedroom door to try to peep through the keyhole’. Malcolm makes a good point about ethics. We are all, as writers, on shaky ground with this: as storytellers we have immense power. We walk through the world, I think, as privileged witnesses, re-making the world as we go. Everything we have seen and lived as humans impacts on how we see the world and how we will fashion it in words. We have to be mindful of that.

We have to remember our obligations to ourselves and to others, as well as our obligations to honesty. Should we write about things that others preferred we didn’t? The answers to that question are too complex for this page. But I can offer the recent experiences of two people to you, one a writer, one the subject of a biography, in an attempt to simplify them.

The writer wrote a fearless account of a period in her life that was immensely painful, and remains so now. In doing so, she exposed secrets that had eaten away at her sense of self and well-being for a long time, secrets that also touched on the lives of others. She didn’t use their names, but she felt strongly that the secrets needed to be told so that she – so that everyone – could feel whole again, could reclaim a sense of their lives and their own goodness.

The other woman, whose biography was published and sold nationally, told candid stories about her life in the book, hid nothing from the biographer or the reader, laid bare herself and her errors, doubts, misgivings, regrets along with her triumphs and all the ordinary miscellany of a life. Some of the stories had never been told before. The biographer handed her the completed manuscript with some trepidation. Would she rescind some of the more shocking stories? The woman changed nothing. She couldn’t wait for publication. Now I’m free, she said, now it’s all told. No one has anything on me. I’m free.

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issue 08:09 | archive by category | archive by author