Memoir

Savage spends the entire collection telling us she’s playing at being an intellectual – that it’s a ruse, yet another trick – and all the while the book provides an object lesson in the many ways that’s simply not true. The un-small line of her vision, the intricacy of her argumentation, the richness of her sources, the cultivation of her contradictory style, pitched between brashness and eloquence, and the pleasures of her experimentation: Blueberries testifies against its author.

One billion animals don’t just die without retribution. Some strong message was saying that were doing things all the way wrong and that a shelter-in-place could provide some food for thought on what we could do next.

‘Begin, I tell myself, at the beginning of an adventure, not at the end of a marriage of twenty years.’ It is with this line that Hilary McPhee opens the second chapter of her second memoir. It’s telling, both because it reads almost like an editorial intervention – as if the editor is present even as she writes – but also because it indicates that there’s something much more important going on than the ‘adventure’ that forms the main narrative arc of the book.

I’ve always preferred Medea. I love her unhinged at the breakup of her relationship and then her transformation in the second act into the terrifying producer of her own drama. I imagine my mother as Medea, her waist-long hair jet black and shiny.

Often against my will, but in my imagination, I would force myself to drive into that river, out of it and alongside it.

Fleming deploys an intelligence that does not seek to draw a firm line between a before and an after; instead, the confessor is borne on the question of drugs and what they mean, rather than born again after drugs have been left behind.

Some memoirs are written in tranquil mood and quiet spaces. Not this one. When Henry Handel Richardson sat down at her desk in September 1942 to contemplate her younger self, the sound of German bombing raids made writing almost impossible. Yet she found the task a welcome escape from the turbulent present. A novel in progress and a short story were put aside. Myself When Young was her last book. Although she did not live to complete it, her memoir opens a door to her past that she had kept firmly closed during her life as a writer.

Poet Peter Skrzynecki reflects on the long life of his collection Immigrant Chronicle.

How to describe the current motherhood-memoir nexus? Owing to commercial pressures, nonfiction books by women writers dealing in any way with motherhood are unlikely to be sold as books of thinking, exploration, reportage, cultural critique or all the above. Instead they are dubbed motherhood memoirs. At the same time writing about mothering has become constrained, made predictable, by certain memoiristic tropes, vocabularies, intensities and scales. I don’t want to make any big declarations about how when you spit in a bookshop you hit a memoir, except to note it’s not only women, it’s brain surgeons, the children of spies, young writers with hybrid identities, survivors of trauma, each getting pushed down the memoir route by their publishers or agents or maybe by their own sense of what kind of books are possible and wanted.

‘I keep thinking: when I was an adolescent, the idea of being ordinary terrified me. And now it’s all I want.’