'Re-writing the hurt' (Jeanette Winterson)

Podcasts can fill me with dread because *sometimes* they are dull and you (often) can't fast-forward. I listened last night - lying down with my eyes closed - to a Jeanette Winterson podcast from 2012, it is a joy and delight. Her clarity and honesty soar and you could listen to her forever. She talks about 're-writing the hurt' in order to be able to cope with the narrative or the memory of what happened. On the writing of truth versus fiction she says she realised - with sadness - after Oranges are Not the Only Fruit that she had written a story that she 'could live with', the other was too painful, she 'could not survive it'. 

As I write slowly, slowly about my Pakistani father, often weeks, even months, with no writing - always thinking, though, always - I understand this more than ever: the stories we (re)write often make the truth bearable. I often say truth comes more easily through fiction. I think it's one reason I had to fictionalise my illness for The State of Me - the physical hell and wilderness of  this illness  -  being a political football, to hell with actual patients - is just too painful.

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I'm reading (non-fiction) The Upstairs Wife by Rafia Zakaria. It's beautifully written and the Partition elements resonate for me, particularly descriptions of Saddar in Karachi, as that is where my father's family migrated to from north India in late 1940s/early 1950s.

I'm also reading (fiction) Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada, which is funny and clever and heartbreaking, told from the point of view of three polar bears, an unnamed grandmother/memoirist, her daughter Tosca (though Barbara, her trainer, narrates parts too), and Tosca's son Knut (based on the real Knut in Berlin Zoo). The memoirist polar bear starts off in the circus and when being trained to get up on hind-legs by appliance of heat says: 'I'd always thought it was the floor feeling pain - not me - so it was the floor that had to change - not me - to make the pain go away'.

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I watched Toni Erdmann on DVD a couple of weeks ago, very different, funny and quirky, if a little unsettling. It is three hours long though and I had to watch it in two parts, no big hardship. It doesn't feel long, and that is the main thing. And is a film that leaves you feeling happy.

Writing, Rituximab & a Japanese film about death

Three pieces on writing I have recently enjoyed:

An interview with Janice Galloway, who has a new collection of short stories out. Speaking about the blurring of memoir and fiction, she says: 'It’s all stories, as far as I’m concerned and your job is to tell the story interestingly and not be dull.'

I agree with her wholeheartedly.

Here, writer Fiona Melrose on how a Caravaggio painting she loves makes her think about story and construct: 'Someone central in your story has to want something that drives some sort of journey, even if the thing they want the most is to stop everything from changing.'

I think that's an interesting point. Writers learn early on their main character has to want something - I remember reading years ago that your character has to really want something, even if it's just a glass of water - but wanting things not to change is often a driving force in real life, so of course applies to fictional characters.

And a very interesting essay on ethnicity and writing - should ethnicity limit what a writer can write? - from  Susan Barker, who describes herself as 'British — mixed-race English and Chinese, but linguistically and culturally British'. I too am British, a Scottish mother and Pakistani father, and I certainly feel culturally and linguistically Scottish. 

I've been thinking recently that Helen Fleet my main character in 'The State of Me' is white, it never occurred to me that she wouldn't be. My novel is about illness, not race. Writing Caucasian characters is natural to me, whereas writing Asian characters is harder as I did not have much Asian influence in my childhood. I am less confident with Asian characters, but that does not mean I should not write them. After all,  fiction-writing is pretending to be someone else. And I am in the slow process. 

I tried to say more about this in the comment thread of an excellent blog post about diversity and fiction  back in June by Nikesh Shukla.

Going back to Susan Barker's essay, she says: 'In a best case scenario, what should determine the legitimacy of fiction is the writing itself, and though this is not always the case, fiction writers should not be deterred from writing from other cultural perspectives.'

Indeed, it's the writing, always the writing.

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Also, good news on Rituximab last month, phase 2 of the Norwegian drug trial was published. I feel cautiously optimistic. Just so gratifying to see actual science in progress, after decades of buffoonery.

And I highly recommend this Japanese film from 2009, 'Departures', a gorgeous film about death.

Radio 3: Childhood, memory, autobiographical narrative & fiction

I have been for some time now been attempting a novella which involves a fierce scraping of my memories in order to fictionalise events in the life of my Pakistani doctor father. Apart from the usual writing/energy challenges, it feels like quite a brutal mining of myself, and for reasons beyond me the narrative is emerging as third person omniscient. A writer friend suggested that the technical challenges of this point of view mirror the emotional challenges. I like that theory.

I am, therefore, fascinated more than ever by childhood, memory and  narrative.

Some interesting radio programmes from Radio 3's 'Free Thinking' series:

Autobiographical writing and Contemporary Fiction', a 15 minute essay slot which explores the complex intertwining of autobiography and fiction, the blurring of selves: 'These gaps between the different versions of the self leave spaces for fictional invention'.

References are made to Lydia Davis, Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt.

I also liked the sentence: 'Memories are revised every time we remember'.

And here on childhood and memory, a longer 45 minute programme: 'Who's Got Hold of Children's Imaginations', writer Patrick Ness suggests that writing is 'the novelist's way to pin down the world and . . .  contain anxiety'. (8.30 mins)

Memory & writing & too many selves

Many years ago I got a copy of Therapeutic Dimensions of Autobiography in Creative Writing by Celia Hunt. I only ever dipped in but highlighted some paragraphs here and there. The other day I came across this: 'As Ulric Neisser says, autobiographical remembering is a complex, many-layered procedure that involves:

1.    actual past events and the historical self who participated in them;

2.   those events as they were then experienced, including the individual’s own perceived self at the time;

3.   the remembering self, that is, the individual in the act of recalling those events on some later occasion; and 4. the remembered self constructed on that occasion.

This means that: ‘The self that is remembered today is not the historical self of yesterday, but only a reconstructed version’, a mixture of fact and fiction, or even on occasion a complete fiction of our imagination.’

It hurts your head to think of all these selves, interesting as the observations are, better not to dwell, I think.  Just write.