Run that by me again...

One of the problems about working on an autobiography (after you get over the idea that it's just a vanity project) is actually working through memories - particularly remembering moments when I was unkind, or unfair, or just plain stupid.

The process reminds me of Castaneda's 'recapitulation', or psychoanalysis, or even that thing the Scientologists do, with an e-meter, where they make you work through upsetting emotional memories over and over again, until they have no more influence on you.  Flat-lining, I guess.  NLP also has various ways of reworking memories and traumas to remove the continuing influence.

I have memories where my toes still curl with embarrassment, for instance, or I get pale or flushed. 

So, along with the delightful memories of better times, moments I wish could have lasted for ever, I also have to confront all these flawed behaviours and incidents and choices. 

Even worse, in describing them, do I put myself down, laugh at myself, or try to justify them?   And do I even have the ability to do that? 

I know my mother used to dismiss my attempts at explanation, as often as not, as though it equalled refusing responsibility for my waywardness.

I am enjoying the process, but it has turned out much slower than just making up stories about imaginary people!

Out Of Order

In working on the autobiography (tales for the grand-children) I seem to have got stuck somewhere, and it appears to be before I was born!

I started studying the Second World War (from which I emerged) with very thin pickings in terms of family legends, and have become involved in the details, rather than the big picture...

I won't go into those details now (vegetarian ration books?  Was my dad too old for call-up, or a conscientious objector who became a fireman in The Blitz?  What was the work my mother was doing, welcoming refugees, entertaining in the underground bomb shelters, etc?)

I am also trying to avoid a particular shape that I have noticed in many autobiographies:

• Start with a high point, the part of the story people may have heard about, or want to hear about.
• Next, the chapter many readers may skip, the dry research of great-grandparents, etc, with few enlivening tales to brisk up the family tree and bits of social history
• Early days, leading to school and those future glimpses (little did he know...)
• Back up the tree, by luck or hard work, to the peak experience of the exciting opening chapter (which I have already told you about...)
• Life since that heady time

I can feel myself nodding off, just at the thought.

Apart from the obvious problem about how much you can say about still-living people, I still can't resolve how much should be about me, and a unique perspective, and how much about my generation, my country, and so on.

I may have to set myself some kind of target, a daily word minimum, which works so well when writing NaNoWriMo novels.

And then I get bored with my own anecdotes, and want to go back to that fiction I wrote last November...

And there's 300 words I will never see again!