Category: Memoir

About the author and blogger ...

Anne Goodwin’s drive to understand what makes people tick led to a career in clinical psychology. That same curiosity now powers her fiction.
A prize-winning short-story writer, she has published three novels and a short story collection with small independent press, Inspired Quill. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize.
Away from her desk, Anne guides book-loving walkers through the Derbyshire landscape that inspired Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Subscribers to her newsletter can download a free e-book of award-winning short stories.

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Going back: Janet Watson on writing her memoir Nothing Ever Happens in Wentbridge

1/5/2014

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HAVE you ever wondered what it would be like to go back to your teenage years? To your first love? Close friends? Not just as an idle thought, but to really immerse yourself in those years, actually talk to those people and see whether their memories match yours?

Dusty Springfield sang about Going Back – the song was played at her funeral – to “the things I learned so well, in my youth”. I carried my story with me for many years but what was it I learned back then? When I started writing notes for a memoir, I knew I too had to go back.

Moving away from home was something we all did after school. In the sixth form we were a close group of nine friends, sharing the boredom of school days, waiting for the excitement of the sort of nights everyone recalls from those vivid, growing-up years; high on the future, bonds strengthened by alcohol, and a new awareness of selves and sexual power.

Then it was university, new lives, friends, marriages, children. But I never forgot the feeling of belonging I had with those friends. Had they felt it too, those three girls and five boys? And when a tragic death ripped the heart out of the group, could we ever be together again and feel the same?

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Fictional memoir: Charli’s flash challenge

21/4/2014

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Carrot Ranch Communications is one of the great new blogs I discovered on the podium of Norah Colvin’s Liebster nominees. Here, along with buckaroo-tinged insights into the writing process, Charli Mills poses a weekly flash fiction challenge. Now, I thought I’d cracked the art of the short short, but my shortest story to date is four times the length of the 99 words set by Charli, practically a saga in comparison. Each week I checked the writing prompt and each week I let it go by, while admiring the efforts of others who managed to shoehorn a proper narrative into under 100 words.

Maybe it was things winding down for Easter, maybe it was the theme of the challenge, but this week I decided to plunge in. But boy, was it hard! Much as I relish pruning back redundant words, this was like growing bonsai. But I persevered in the knowledge that limits can be liberating for writers, and Charli’s introduction had already drawn me in.

She writes about how a glimpse of the world can spark a memory, and that memory can lead us towards a choice of creative paths. One leads to memoir, another to fiction: why someone might follow one route rather than the other to tell their story is something I’ve been pondering lately, as I’m looking forward to hosting a post from a memoirist here later this month.

Charli’s 99-word challenge is to “write a biography for a character, alter-ego or you”. Well, I struggle enough with the bios editors request to accompany my short story publications, so you can guess which way I was going to go. And I thought it would be useful to tighten up my thinking about a character I’m musing on. So it’s over to Bernie, in her ninety-nine words:

Winning the TV quiz show, Family Challenge, assured me a rosy future. My encyclopaedic knowledge would fuel my teaching career. I hadn’t bargained for a pregnancy midway through the training. When I surrendered my baby for adoption, I lost my sense of purpose too.

Can’t complain, though. I work in a school, albeit in admin. I’m extremely popular on quiz nights down the pub. But, if people ask if I have children, I don’t know what to say.

Everything’s changing again, as Jason has made contact. Given he’s about to become a father, can I call myself Grandma now?

After reading some of the beautifully poetic contributions already up on the site, I think I might have fallen into the trap of prioritising information over style. Clearly, more practice is in order, but at least I’m getting to know Bernie a little better.

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How to be a heroine

7/3/2014

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On a pilgrimage to Wuthering Heights, Samantha Ellis got into a debate with her best friend as to which Brontë heroine was best: Cathy Earnshaw or Jane Eyre. The shock of finding herself persuaded by her friend’s argument sent her stumbling back to revisit the heroines of her thirty-odd years’ devotion to fiction. How to Be a Heroine, part memoir, part feminist literary critique, is the result.

When I ‘won’ a copy on Twitter, I thought I’d nailed this year’s blog post for International Women’s Day. Unlike last year, I wouldn’t have to do search around for my own fictional heroines. Samantha Ellis would do the job for me.

Although I shy away from non-fiction these days (The Examined Life by Stephen Grosz a rare and exceptional exception), I quickly became engrossed in the book. I warmed to the voice, and the meticulous attention to detail balanced with touches of self-mocking humour:

When Rhett sees that [Scarlett’s] hand is scarred, rough from work, sunburnt, freckled, the nails broken, palm calloused, thumb blistered, he spits, ‘These are not the hands of a lady.’ (The most direct result of reading Gone With The Wind again is that I have become more assiduous about using hand cream.) (p88)

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