Why it’s a labour of love almost goes without saying. It must be in part a hymn to the past, and if it’s a family memoir (as Shifting Classes is) it is rooted in many personal histories. You will be writing about the closest members of your family, and your closest friends. The very act of writing up these personal stories leads you to relive all kinds of past intimacies. Many will be loving and happy events, milestones in a life such as births, weddings, celebrations of educational or sporting or occupational success. Some of the intimacies will be complex and difficult: angry squabbles, misunderstandings, clouds without silver linings. As an author, you give yourself the power to interpret all these differing relationships, to draw your own portraits of people. These interpretations may be challenged outside the pages of the book, but not within them. The power this gives the memoirist is not to be used lightly. On the other hand, you will always be held accountable by your readers. Those in the inner circles of your story will, as readers, be able to fight back: to criticise, correct, disagree. As I remark in the Preface, honouring my mother’s favourite phrase, ‘the living truth’ has many versions, and I would never wish to claim superiority for my own version, as set out in this memoir (I will discuss another time the interesting issue of whether there is a blurred line between fact and fiction, either in memoir, biography, or creative forms of literature.)
Where does the frustration come in? Well, not with the writing itself: in my experience, once you are started the writing takes over, and you can’t stop. Of course, there are irritations along the way, often to do with the technology (hard-won text lost through computer glitches, confusion over which of several versions is the latest corrected one). But the major frustration comes at the point where you have a version you are sufficiently pleased with to consider that it might be publishable. Here you enter a battle zone littered with the corpses of would-be authors, shot down by hatchet-faced publishers or simply left for dead by literary agents who don’t even tell you why. It’s not the rejection letters that hurt, at least someone has had a considering look; no, what gets to you is the Silence, the Not Knowing, until after a few weeks you have to accept that any considering look given to your work was probably one of contempt.
But you can still be saved from all this frustration, as I have been, by the Magic Hat of Self-Publishing, from which a wide variety of rabbits may now spring: and rabbits may in fact be found in Chapter Six: Country Life: Happiness and Miseries.
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