The Guardian’s chief books writer Lisa Allardice has interviewed Margaret Atwood many times over the course of her career, but “she has always said she had no interest in writing a memoir – more fool me for believing her!”
Having written novels, poems and essays, at 85 the author of The Handmaid’s Tale has finally decided the time is right to pen the story of her own life, following in the footsteps of many of her fellow novelists.
“Reading novelists in their own voices on their own lives can enrich our understanding of their fiction,” says Allardice, who points to poet and writer Blake Morrison’s 1993 book And When Did You Last See Your Father?
“Morrison was a trailblazer for the modern contemporary memoir,” she says – the moving account of the author’s memories of his father became the powerful film of the same name in 2007, starring Jim Broadbent, Colin Firth and Juliet Stevenson.
More recently, Richard Flanagan won the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction for his genre-bending Question 7, a blend of memoir, novel, and history. Flanagan experiments with what a memoir can do: “Here on the page we meet the author, but moreover: we meet ourselves” wrote Guardian reviewer Tara June Winch.
Question 7 will no doubt become on of the books that Flanagan is best known for – just as Salman Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton, about his time in hiding after a fatwa calling for his death was issued by Iran’s supreme leader in 1989, and Knife, an account of the attempt to murder him in 2022, have become two of the novelist’s key works.
William Boyd said on a recent episode of BBC Radio 4’s Front Row that Martin Amis’s autobiography Experience would come to be seen as his best book. Allardice wouldn’t go that far, but she agrees that the book “imprints itself on your psyche as unforgettably as Money or The Information”.
While some novelist’s memoirs are a straightforward account of the writer’s life, others, like Jesmyn Ward’s brilliant Men We Reaped, home in on specific family members. The two-time winner of the National Book award’s 2013 book tells the stories of the five Black men in Ward’s life who all died within a four-year period.
Allardice’s personal favourites are Hilary Mantel’s Giving up the Ghost, “written when she was 50, a decade before she would embark on the defining project of her career, the Wolf Hall trilogy,” and Jeanette Winterson’s “wonderfully titled Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, a question put to her by her ferocious, now legendary mother Mrs Winterson.”
Although the memoir covers much the same ground as Winterson debut autofictional novel Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, “to read her looking back on her difficult childhood and life as a successful writer in middle-age has added poignancy and wisdom,” Allardice says.
Martin Amis. Photograph: Martin Lawrence/Daily Mail/Shutterstock
