Writing the Story of My Life By Sophie Roell, like a lot of people these days I’ve been trying to write the story of my life. I haven’t got a title yet, and of course I don’t know how it’s going to end - or even which way it’s heading, most of the time. But overall, it’s still fairly rewarding. I don’t have to do any research, as it’s all in my head, and I don’t have to worry (as a friend who recently wrote a biography of a famous person did) that I might lose interest in or sympathy with the main protagonist.
I am one of the editors of the books section of The Browser, where famous people recommend books, so I read a lot of books myself. One of the books recommended by David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, is by an American psychologist called Jonathan Haidt. The book is called The Happiness Hypothesis. I’ve already sent it to all my friends, I find it so compelling. One of the things it touches on (in passing) is the issue of the “life story”. Haidt quotes another psychologist called McAdams saying that as human beings we can’t stop ourselves from “creating an evolving story that integrates a reconstructed past, perceived present and anticipated future into a coherent and vitalizing life myth.” Apparently this is a vital part of our personality. And when bad things happen, if we can make sense of them within our life story (myth), then we can cope with them, and even grow stronger because of them.
I know nothing about psychology so I won’t try to come to any broader conclusions than that (or compare it to anything Freud said on the subject). But that as a person I’m continually writing stories in my head, I can certainly vouch for that. It may also explain why memoir writing, as a genre, has completely taken off in the past 15 years. It’s supposedly still one of the hottest areas in the publishing industry. It’s not just me - everybody just loves to write about themselves.
Fortuitously, as part of my work for The Browser, I interviewed the American author and humorist, Calvin Trillin recently (Trillin, by the way, despite not remotely resembling an economist, has written by far the most compelling account of the cause of the financial crisis to date . And he chose, as his topic, memoirs. I’ve put the link at the bottom. For those of you, like me, who do want to write the stories of their lives, it has some interesting pointers. He chose five memoirs that he enjoyed, and you probably won’t have heard of a single one of the authors. And that’s the point, a memoir doesn’t have to be about a famous person. It’s just about someone recounting their experience in an authentic manner. Of course the experience they recount tends to be horrible, and the genre is sometimes called the “misery memoir”. A Million Little Pieces, the memoir by the drug addict (which Trillin discusses) in the US at least has become the rule, not the exception: there’s not much a market for happy memoirs (though obviously not all of them turn out to be fake). Which ties in perfectly with what the psychologist Haidt was saying: that we are writing these stories partly to deal with and make sense of trauma. Not that you have to launch your career as a best-selling author to get the benefits. You don’t even need to become a full-blown wannabe writer to work trauma out of your system by writing. You can just write for yourself, at home. But Haidt has some pointers on this. It’s not just letting off steam type of writing, it’s not just about getting the trauma off your chest. It’s about making sense of what happened in your writing. Making it part of your story. Only then does it help. Trauma is partly why I write, I think.
This was my first article for The Times (of London), back in 2003. Overall though, I don’t think the book I eventually write is going to be depressing. Also, while I’ve billed it as the story of my life, it’s actually going to be a three-generational thing – about my grandmother (a beautiful Austrian Jewish woman who lived in Constantinople and Vienna), my mother (a socialite who met Stalin in Moscow after World War II and danced with Walter Cronkite, the American newsreader at embassy parties), and only lastly myself. As I’ve got complete control over my life myth, and can invest it with my own meaning, I’ve decided the unifying theme I am going to embrace is glamour. (On which topic, by the way, you can read lifestyle guru Helena Frith Powell at The Browser too. Read Calvin Trillin on Memoirs.
PS, Note to Self. Remember to ask Jonathan Haidt: when does interpretation of life myth turn into delusion?
