Memoir Writing

Missing Martin Amis

May 25, 2023

The death of Martin Amis, reported Saturday last, stopped me in my tracks, just as the death of Hilary Mantel did. For a few hours, my world of words cracked and heaved open as another giant left. Amis was a controversial figure often accused of arrogance, of courting celebrity, sometimes of misogyny. I don’t wish to draw a veil over these charges, some of which are presented in Dinner With Martin Amis, Julia Bell’s sparkling essay, published in the Paris Review. Yet on social media, following the announcement, he was invariably described as kind, generous and polite, and this, not by other well-known authors, but often by people who just happened to meet him at signings, on courses, or by chance. It seems he was unfailingly supportive of other writers.

It is his neon prose that I fell in love with. Amis was a master stylist, a writer for whom every word in a sentence, and its position, mattered. In my early days of writing, I remember taking a page from one of his novels, London Fields, and experimenting by writing a page of my novel in his style. Pastiche not parody. It may sound like an odd idea, but I believe this kind of practice can jump start our writing, and can also shock us out of our own more predictable prose. We may not use the page we produce, but it will offer up learning and always something new.

Even more than admiring his writing, I hold fast to the books, in particular to reading his memoir, Experience, of which John Banville said, ‘Page for page, it is probably the best piece of prose you are likely to read this year. It is moving, angry, honest, and above all wonderfully stylish…’

I bought the book the morning my mother died.

It was a bright summer’s morning in July. I’d sat with her alone from the early hours until just gone eight when she took her last breath. Later I went with my father and young daughter down into the town of Weston-super-Mare. We wandered into Waterstone’s where the hardback of Experience was on display. I bought a copy. It is always my instinct, at times of crisis–when I’m in need of reassurance, to make sense of the world or perhaps to escape it–to turn to my lifetime habit of reading, and grab a book. I didn’t need consolation. I done what I’d come to do, to sit with my mother in her dying, after an estrangement of several years. I wasn’t grieving, that had happened long before, but I needed something big and expansive, a book that was all consuming to envelop me and, Experience, did just that.

I’ve done a lot of reading this week, particularly at the weekend when my plans were scuppered by a sore throat and an overwhelming fatigue. Luckily the weather was glorious and so I spent much of it sitting in the garden. I don’t sit still much, certainly not for long periods of time. I’m generally someone who keeps on the move except of course when I’m writing. (Reading too, but more often than not, I do that towards the end of the day.) I sometimes think my love of writing comes in part from the way it slows me down, puts me in a quiet meditative place of flow and presence. Martin Amis said, ‘a writer is most alive when alone.’ I know what he means, for though I spent a lot of time at the weekend alone and silent, my mind was wild and untethered, truly alive, moving between the many and different prospects for my next project. This is a special kind of joy and aliveness for a writer

Among other things, I’ve been reading, The Ghost in the Throat, (thank you to Donna for the recommendation) a unique memoir, described as, ‘essay and autofiction,’ which explores the inner life and the deep connection felt between two writers, centuries apart. There are ways in which The Ghost in the Throat, takes me back to my first novel The Sweet Track, about two women, once childhood friends now separated by circumstance and in search of each other. The novel is set where I grew up in the estuary town of Burnham-on-Sea, in the Somerset Levels. It is fiction but with a substantial pinch of autobiography. Halfway through the writing of the novel, I discovered the actual Sweet Track, an ancient Neolithic pathway made across the levels, named after a peat digger Ray Sweet who first unearthed it. A new title emerged and with it a new character, a neolithic women, walking this track, journeying to the sea, her footsteps echoing down through history to my two protagonists, making the eternal connection between all women’s lives.

Here, I’d like to make a confession, which may also act as a warning. I stupidly used family names in this novel. I intended to change them, but didn’t. I called the grandmother, Edith. My own grandmother was called Edith. But in the novel I based Edith’s character on the dark and difficult side of my mother. In doing so I did my grandmother a disservice and I didn’t realise until it was too late. She was nothing like the Edith of The Sweet Track. She could be difficult granted, but to me she was kind and motherly, she loved me unconditionally and she was often the bright light in my unhappy days. I should have changed those names, I regret that I didn’t and I offer this to you as a warning.

You can probably glean from all of this that my thoughts are leaning towards memoir, especially towards creative memoir, in it’s more fragmented, hybrid form. Yesterday in my study I searched out my old memoir file and discovered just how much material is already there and how many connecting threads there are, in particular: the sea, dressmaking–the clothes my mother wore, the clothes she made me–her narcissism, our estrangement. But I’m not interested in writing a misery memoir. All I know at this point is I want to find a way through that is creative and joyful. That acknowledges the worst but celebrates the best. Wish me luck…

Thanks for reading - do leave a comment, I love to hear from you…

Avril x

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