In Trouble Again: The Perils Of Memoir – Gabrielle Carey

Gabrielle Carey (with Kathy Lette) wrote her first novel, Puberty Blues, at the age of 20. Since then she has authored seven books of both fiction and non-fiction. Over 13 years, Gabrielle Carey has taught creative writing at various universities, currently at the University of Technology, Sydney. Gabrielle Carey addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 16 September 2009, and spoke of the pursuit of reality, the limits on our capacity for choice and her latest book, The Waiting Room, a personal essay about her late mother.

IN TROUBLE AGAIN: THE PERILS OF MEMOIR

GABRIELLE CAREY

It’s a curious but a very human phenomenon that we don’t learn from experience. If we did, I would have stopped writing memoir thirty years ago. I would have learnt, after the publication of my very first book, that writing based on real experience almost always lands you in trouble.

Although Puberty Blues is not classified as a memoir, when it was released, everyone knew that it was based on reality and real experiences. We changed some names, created a few composite characters, rearranged incidents and events to serve a storyline – as most writers do – but the strength of the book was its basis in reality. Its basis was in truth.

And where did that get us? In trouble. In deep, deep trouble. Not only with parents, neighbours and friends in the Shire (now ex-friends) but with the entire country. In a way that would be hard to imagine now, the publication of Puberty Blues caused a national moral outrage. People were incensed that we dared to tell tales of teenage sexuality and surfie culture. Radio interviewers, TV chat show hosts and publicity agents – almost without exception – treated us like liars. Many parents simply refused to believe what we said. It might be true of other people’s teenage children, but not theirs.

‘What right do you have to write such a monstrous book?” one audience member demanded during a live recording of the Peter Couchman show.

How did we land ourselves in so much trouble? We had written about reality – as memoirists do. Afterwards, when Kathy and I went our separate ways, she chose the sensible path and turned to fiction. I, on the other hand, stayed with the real. Not a choice I would recommend, with hindsight, but choice – that word so beloved of our age – is a word about which I have always been very suspicious.

Although the Puberty Blues trouble was probably the most infamous of my perilous memoir moments, it certainly didn’t stop there. With each book I learnt that the part you worry about – where you mentioned someone’s mother in a not so flattering light perhaps – the part that makes the publisher’s lawyer so nervous – turns out not to be the part you should have worried about at all. And that the person you decide not to mention by name because you know how they feel about their privacy, is the person who comes up to you later asking why she was left out the story. And that the person you were certain would be thrilled to have their name mentioned turns out to feel insulted and exploited. Even when you’ve sent the draft manuscript round to everyone you possibly can – so they can compare their memory of the event to yours – and even when they say yes, that’s the way it happened, there is always someone who won’t be happy with your version of events.

When I wrote a book about my experiences of visiting gaols for example, a prison officer sued for defamation because the person I remembered  and wrote about (a sadistic key-jangler) was not what he remembered (a man just doing his job). When I wrote about my father, my sister was offended because what I remembered (a flawed but still loveable father) was not what she remembered (a selfish obsessive who neglected his family). And when I wrote my reminiscences of the times surrounding the publication of Puberty Blues, I was accused of writing a ‘one-sided’ memoir. Is there any such thing as a multiple-view memoir, one has to wonder?

Despite these problems with attempting to write reality, I have stayed with the real because that’s where I felt I belonged; where my strengths, if any, lay. And because, when it comes down to it, I believe that all literature is rooted in the real. Even the revolutionary fiction of James Joyce is based on personal experience and actual people. When Joyce was asked, for example, “Why is Bloom portrayed as an Hungarian Jew?’ he answered famously, ‘Because he was.”

As Richard Ellman, Joyce’s biographer, wrote: Joyce ‘was never a creator ex nihilo; he recomposed what he remembered.’

And herein lies the trouble: the recomposing of what the writer remembers. The biggest problem with memoir is just that: the fact that it is based on memory. And memory, as we all know, is a slippery sort of witness, perhaps the original unreliable narrator. Memory doesn’t work like a computer or a camera. The act of remembering isn’t like reaching into a filing cabinet to retrieve a document; a human memory is not a neat, accurate recording of an event. Although based on historical reality, memory doesn’t completely encompass reality; it selects and modifies.

How you remember things also depends on the way you feel at the time of recollection. In the process of remembering, our memories fictively rearrange reality. Maybe you could call this creative remembering. Maybe it’s the reason why I often find myself in trouble when I take these imaginative reconstructions and write them down – because my reconstructions are not the same as other people’s. Which is why, when I wrote my most recent book about my mother, I wanted to get it right. Or as right as one can ever get these things. To that end I gave a copy of the manuscript to my mother, as well as my son and daughter, long before it went to publication. They all approved – although my 12 year old son insisted I pay him embarrassment money because of the scene I’d written about him in the bath when he was eight.  And my daughter insisted that I add something sexy about her because she thought she came across as a nerd. My mother, in her typically mysterious and inscrutable way, responded with one sentence: “Yes, that’s how it happened.” Well, at least that was a confirmation of my memory.

But I knew I couldn’t pursue it any further; I couldn’t say, “But how do you feel about it?” My mother wasn’t one for talking about feelings. Or articulating them, or expressing them. Which was why, when I finished the book, I found myself faced with a new kind of memoir dilemma. The dilemma was about whether to leave my manuscript in the bottom drawer – thereby preserving my mother’s intensely guarded privacy – or publish and thereby give public testimony to a great woman. I was very aware that my mother – who had worked just as hard as my father in the area of peace and social justice – had received little recognition. I yearned to provide her with some sort of acknowledgement, not just for her good works, but for good life and good character. And yet, I wondered, was this really about my wants rather than hers? I debated this dilemma for some five years; at first making the decision I couldn’t possibly publish and then finally, deciding that, on balance, the book would honour my mother rather than embarrass her. But my decision was too late. Five days after the book was launched my mother died.

Had I examined my conscience for too long? Taken my scruples too far? “It would have been one of the greatest thrills of her life,” one of my long-term friends commented. Or was it better all round that she was saved from the sometimes brutal experience of the public gaze, not to mention the insensitivity of certain reviewers? Is there ever any decision that is absolutely right and beyond any doubt?

In a recent commentary, in The Guardian, Madeleine Bunting wrote that research into the human mind is beginning to show that we have much less control over our lives than we thought and that much of our decision-making is really made by unconscious habits of mind. She describes the ideal of “choice” as “the great sacred mythology of our time”.

Which brings me back to the life of a memoirist. Does anyone really choose to be a memoir-writer? Or a writer of any kind? The idea of choice conjures the image of a school-leaver who has been advised by a careers counsellor that, given her strengths and weaknesses, she is perfectly suited to a life that has no definite career path, no structure for promotion, no annual bonuses, no performance indicators, no social life, no professional support and no possibility for retirement benefits or superannuation. (Although it does provide plenty of opportunity for finding yourself in trouble, both personally and professionally.) Who, one has to wonder, would actually choose this way of life?

Which is why, after all these years, I’ve finally decided to renounce my vocation, to give up my long-held vice of writing memoir, and retire to the creative writing classroom. And what is the first rule we teachers tell our students about creating a successful story? The golden rule? For your story to be interesting, I tell my students, your character must be in trouble. Here’s the equation: character plus trouble equals plot.

Which is an equation that is lot easier to learn than: writer plus memoir equals trouble.

Before reading a little from the book, I’ll give you a little context. It is the story of realising that my mother, at the age of 80, is suffering increasing memory loss. Then we discover that she has a brain tumour. But this took quite a long time; not because the symptoms weren’t there but because we, her children, just didn’t want to see them.

That day was what forced me to finally make the appointment for a brain scan. When the tumour was revealed it was so big it was advised that we put her into hospital as soon as possible. Amid all this I was working, trying to finish a book, caring for a difficult teenage daughter and my boisterous eight-year-old son. And they weren’t very impressed with the fact that their mother suddenly wasn’t there for them.

Indeed, when you try to write down “what really happened” you begin to realise to what extent each and every one of us are storytellers; how each and every one of us has our own version of an event – how each of us renarrates, rewrites and edits based – not just on the event – but how we feel about the event. How we felt it when it happened – and we feel now, years later.