Memoir

‘“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.

If memoirs are confessions, then Chris Fleming’s autobiographical treatise On Drugs moves in wonder and probing curiosity over the events, actions, and impulses that he confesses.

Some memoirs are written in tranquil mood and quiet spaces. Not this one. When Henry Handel Richardson sat down at…

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.’

‘The truth is that there would be no Joyce without the three women who supported him: Nora, his life-long partner, Sylvia Beach, the first publisher of Ulysses, and Harriet Shaw Weaver, his benefactor. Lover, publisher and salary provider. Chance furnished him with exactly what he needed. So he certainly doesn’t need another handmaiden in the form of a small-time Australian essayist. But for some reason, I need him.’

In Li’s, Friedmann’s and Febos’ work, the polyvocal I draws together facets of self and subjectivity, braiding them, while unbraiding simpler notions of a singular, truthful I. As reticence and disclosure speak together, or loss and hope, or the I and we of postmemory and of empathy, form becomes capacious. Like Febos’ ‘Abandon Me’, each of these works proceeds piece by piece like a poem, stanza by stanza, assays that get where they do by breaking both linear narrative and certainty, and by reassembling the smashed pieces to see what light they might shed and what delight they might preface.