My long-drawn-out attempt at a memoir and what it taught me.
When I went to live in Zimbabwe, I was in the middle of re-reading Robert Fulghum’s wonderful book, ‘All I Really Need To Know I learned In Kindergarten.’ This is one of the gems from it: “Every person passing through this life will unknowingly leave something and take something away. Most of this ‘something’ cannot be seen or heard or numbered. It does not show up in a census. But nothing counts without it.” Since I figured that he was mostly talking about memories, I was spurred on to leave some of my ‘something’ behind, so I began work on a memoir.
At least, I thought it was a memoir when I started, and I did this, rather haphazardly, in whatever snippets of time I could purloin. Somewhere along the way, I must have decided to turn it into a work of fiction, because it took off in several mysterious directions. This enterprise gradually mushroomed into an enormous tome that ran into a few years, two countries, and two volumes! With something I now regard as a shocking disregard for the trees, I obtained some good quality paper and trundled off to a pop-up printer stationed in the Metro Centre in Gateshead, UK. This is where I was holidaying at the time. Strange but true. This is also where I learned something else, albeit a bit late in the piece, when the guy in charge dropped a page and we both discovered that I hadn’t numbered the pages! The poor man became extremely nervous after that and I’m sure he won’t ever forget my print job.
Luckily, ordinary life intervened then, and I put that burgeoning disaster on hold until I had more breathing space and sense. Some considerable time later, when I looked at the memoir again, I could clearly see that it was a hopelessly meandering and confusing saga. The only positive is that I did, at least, finish it. I laughed then as I remembered my call to action. I’m still sure Fulghum is right, but my ‘something’ cannot be seen or heard (and nor should it ever be), and it certainly wasn’t numbered. Hah!
By way of mitigation for myself, I could claim that I was merely honing my craft, but no! I will not let myself off the hook that easily. I hadn’t got a clue what I was doing. That’s the truth. Looking back now, however, I know that I learned a lot from the enterprise. For one thing, it taught me that I had the discipline to finish what I started. It taught me that I had a lot to learn. It also taught me that I needed to research the genre, listen to other writers, take a few courses, etc. The next memoir I wrote contained structured recollections. There was no gloss, and there were no tangents or pretensions, but it was still too long. By that stage, I was truly learning to write. When I eventually pared my collection down, I had learned a lot more about myself, and the final memoir is something I am now proud to leave behind.