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Writing a memoir is a very complicated matter and I would like this evening to explore the process with you. The conscious intention is to give aid and comfort to others on their own journeys. There are, however, other less acceptable reasons that drive some of us to treat our own lives like material, to report the truth from behind the lines, as accurately as we can.
Among these is the intense need to volunteer as a witness. Witness is a word that is marked now in part as indicating Holocaust testimony. I do not mean to debase or diminish that association but when we speak of memoir I still need to use the word ‘witnessing’ in its most basic sense: to provide an accurate testimony of what really happened. So far so good-but the act of witnessing contains within its resonances, within its bounds, the not-so-civilised hope for revenge. It serves as a child's cry, ‘I will tell on you’. This witnessing, sometimes many years after the insult, is the last resort of the powerless, the child for example. It contains the message that what you have done will not be hidden, I will expose it for all the world to see. Then you will be revealed for what you are and held accountable for what you have done.
This accusation can be addressed to God or Fate or Life itself as the cause of one's pain: God who allowed a brain tumour in a needed father, who gave or allowed breast cancer to a surviving mother, orphaning three children. We are also talking about parents who did neglectful or ignorant or evil things or, as in this story, aunts and uncles who betrayed the trust placed in them. This desire for revenge is a spark to the memory, sets the mind on its backward path, spurs the effort of writing and ensures the final act of publication.
I don't imagine many memoirs are written without a goodly salting with rage. Anger is behind the need for revenge and anger is the handmaiden, the husband, the bride, the mother of revenge. We tell ourselves other things, explain our motives in more ci