On Life Writing

I’ve been thinking about life writing – what it is and what it means – since I got invited to do a workshop with offenders in Durham prison. English PEN are an incredible international organisation that campaign to defend writers and readers around the world whose right to freedom of expression is at risk. They asked me to do a workshop as part of their Life Stories project with long term prisoners in the North East, and the experience is eternally embedded in my mind.I was asked because my debut novel, How to be Brave, was inspired by truth. Painful truth. It took a long time for me to be able to write it; three other novels to be exact. Because I had to face fully the time my daughter almost died, and how I saved her with the power of a real life story – that of my grandfather’s bravery at sea during the Second World War.

By definition life writing is the recording of selves, memories and experiences via autobiography, memoir, diary, letter, personal essay and, more recently, digital forms such as blog and email. In my novel I created a fictional diary so that my grandfather had his own voice. I wrote Natalie, the main narrator, in first person so she spoke clearly too.   Though she was inspired by my own experiences I found I could be all the more true with this literary distance.

Isn’t all writing life writing? Life made us who we are and so it makes us what we write. We’re influenced (both consciously and subconsciously) by what has happened to us. Every word we put down we expose ourselves in some way. Writing our stories helps us to look at things more clearly. We can make sense of what has happened to us by recording it. It’s safe to do so. It’s therapeutic. It helps us understand our own feelings. We often make decisions while writing. We can be as honest as we want to and show no one. It might be painful at times, but it gets the pain out.

The prison writers I met in Durham showed that despite their crimes they know beauty. Despite bad life choices, they have created something good – art.

They wrote poetically of past jobs, camping trips as teens, car accidents, and childhood bike rides. I looked at the journals these prisoners proudly shared. Inside were detailed sketches and lines and lines of handwriting, some more readable than others. Their lives matter as much as any, and I felt they were learning this as they created. Because only they can tell their stories. Only they have been through what they’ve been through. They can see the world in a way no one else can. They feel and know things no one else does.

As a child I was always compelled to write. I filled exercise books with words, always made up. Fiction was my escape. But when I wrote these stories I was writing my life. I didn’t know it then, but I do now. I wrote about teenage girls who felt they didn’t fit in, about children separated from their parents for one reason or another, about people who couldn’t quite remember some dark event. These characters never had my name, but they were always me.

My next novel, The Mountain in my Shoe, has a narrative that is a child’s lifebook. This is a book where all the foster carers, adoptive parents and social workers write up a child-in-the-care-system’s history so they have something to remember it all when they are adults.

These children don’t have parents to pass stories onto them and so this lifebook is their memory. After doing voluntary work with such kids, I was fascinated by these books and how they were the truest of life writing. A gift really. And so in The Mountain in my Shoe I created a missing boy and told some of the story via his lifebook.

Aren’t we all missing if we don’t write? I’ve often felt that I don’t exist unless I sit down and record everything. I don’t feel quite right if I don’t write. Life overwhelms me if I don’t explore it in syllables, vowels and consonants, give it meaning through rhythm and rhyme.

The first thing children learn to write is their own name. Over and over. This is who I am. Don’t forget me, don’t ignore me, love me. The first thing I asked the prisoners that day was their names.

When I left them in their library I looked back to wave at them. I had given them each a copy of How to be Brave and signed it for them; they were all holding it up, waving back at me. They had shared their stories with me and said this is us. I gave them my book and said this is me. We exchanged the greatest gifts possible – our words. Our lives. Ourselves.

How to be Brave (Orenda Books) is currently out in paperback, on Kindle and as an audiobook. The Mountain in my Shoe will be released in September 2016.

 

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Louise Beech has always been haunted by the sea, and regularly writes travel pieces for the Hull Daily Mail, where she was a columnist for ten years. Her short fiction has won the Glass Woman Prize, the Eric Hoffer Award for Prose, and the Aesthetica Creative Works competition, as well as shortlisting for the Bridport Prize twice and being published in a variety of UK magazines.

Louise lives with her husband and children on the outskirts of Hull – the UK’s 2017 City of Culture – and loves her job as a Front of House Usher at Hull Truck Theatre, where her first play was performed in 2012. She is also part of the Mums’ Army on Lizzie and Carl’s BBC Radio Humberside Breakfast Show.

How To Be Brave is Louise’s first book. The Mountain in My Shoe will be published in September.  Follow her on Twitter as @LouiseWriter