This Is Your Life
In praise of memoir
“The best thing about the depression was the way it reunited our family and gave my sister Mary a real opportunity to prove that anybody can do anything, especially Betty.”
When I was fifteen, I read Betty MacDonald’s humorous memoir, Anybody Can Do Anything, which I found nestled on a cluttered shelf at home. I was hooked from the first sentence.
It was funny, it was spunky, it was inspiring.
It’s about Betty’s quest to find work in Seattle in the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s, after her marriage ends in divorce and she and her two children move in with her mother and sister.
Her memoir showed me that what you don’t know you can blag, if you’re a fast learner. That having someone who believes in you (in Betty’s case, her sister Mary) makes up for all kinds of shortfalls. And that someone has to get the job, so why shouldn’t it be me?
I’d always loved stories about triumph over adversity. Bunty was my comic of choice as a child, full of stories of plucky gals. One won a show-jumping competition on a cow. One became a champion ice skater. The Four Marys had such a jolly time solving mysteries at their boarding school it almost made me wish I went to one.
But that was all fictional comic-strip stuff, of course.
At a fancy dress party, aged eight, I put on my A-line dress, tied my hair back and picked up a notebook and pencil.
“What have you come as?” one of the grown-ups asked me.
“I’m a journalist,” I said.
I gazed out of my bedroom window at the hills to the south, towards Sheffield, imagining what lay beyond.
I dreamed of journeying to London, to emulate the sparky young career women on the BBC TV drama Take Three Girls. Its infectious 30-second theme tune by Pentangle is up there with Friends and 30 Rock.
“Come down to London town, watch the people there,
Rushing round and round with no time to spare…”
The career advice at my South Yorkshire comprehensive was that boys who didn’t pay attention in class would end up working “dahn’t’pit”; and the girls would work the sewing machines at Supersuits until they got married and settled down. (Nowadays the equivalent would probably be working at a distribution centre, the landscape is so changed.)
Any sign on TV, in magazines or in books, that women could escape such a fate was catnip to me.
My other ambition, apart from writer, was to be a ballet dancer, but that fizzled out at thirteen when I couldn’t hack the five nights a week after-school commitment. Also, I knew my parents couldn’t afford it.
Betty MacDonald’s memoir showed me a woman writing entertainingly about managing her life in difficult circumstances.
It whetted my appetite for reading memoirs and diaries. I craved guidance on how to live and how to push the boundaries.
In my early twenties I devoured everything by Anaïs Nin: poetry, fiction, erotica (her book, Delta of Venus, published posthumously in 1977, made her notorious). But it was her diaries I loved most. What a whirlwind of a life. She was married, but lived adventurously. She partied with famous folk, including Salvador Dali. She sponsored budding writers, including Henry Miller, deciding he was a literary genius. She had an affair with him and also with his wife, June. She drops famous names like confetti.
Nin was philosophical and also interested in psychology. The famous quote, “We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are,” is hers.
She was fearless. This 2015 article in The Guardian by Sady Doyle sums her up well:
In her lifetime, Nin was an oddity: for one thing, she was a woman who wrote explicitly about sex from a female point of view. Her work included frank portrayals of illegal abortions, extramarital affairs and incest, all of which Nin wrote about without judging her female characters.
I’d forgotten until I just now flicked through the first volume of her diaries, that she experienced stillbirth. It’s one of the most vivid accounts of it I’ve ever read. It culminates with her shouting at the doctors, “Let me alone, all of you!” as she finds her own way to persuade her body to deliver her dead daughter.
Her narcissism and unconventionality were a heady mix and her writing wasn’t taken seriously by her contemporaries, until she started publishing her journals in 1963. That made everyone sit up and pay attention! Boy, had she taken notes!
Reading her in my early twenties was like opening a portal onto another, alluring world.
After her, I gobbled up everything by Simone de Beauvoir. (Who wouldn’t want to know more about the author of The Second Sex.)
Since then, I’ve continued to turn to memoir for inspiration, escapism, humour, to learn about history. Sometimes I read it to reflect what’s going on in my own life. (There’s something comforting about reading about someone else’s grief when you’re grieving, for instance.)
Other people’s memories never exactly match our own, of course; that’s the point of it. We’re all of us unique. But memoir makes you realise that we all drink from the same well of humanity.
The memoir first-lines quiz
I was features editor on the UK magazine, Just Seventeen, in the mid-1980s (yes, Betty MacDonald was right: anybody can do anything! I did go to London and get to be a journalist!). I know that readers love a good quiz.
Here are tasters of twelve of my favourite memoirs, via a list of their first lines, followed by a list of the books and their authors.
No prizes, but see if you can match them up. Answers (not upside down!) are in the notes at the foot of the page1.
The first lines:
a) I was born at four o’clock in the morning on the 9th of January 1908 in a room fitted with white-enamelled furniture and overlooking the boulevard Raspail.
b) This book exists on the premise that somebody, somewhere, is interested in who I am, how I got that way, and what the fuck I’m talking about.
c) I do not now have the slightest understanding of the events which got us out of one big white house which we rented into another, bigger white house which we own, at least in part.
d) “What you looking at me for? I didn’t come to stay…”
I hadn’t so much forgot as I couldn’t bring myself to remember. Other things were more important.
e) At the age of fifteen my grandmother became the concubine of a warlord general, the police chief of a tenuous national government of China.
f) Louveciennes resembles the village where Madame Bovary lived and died.
g) 1 January. This morning (we lying lately in the garret) I rose, put on my suit with great skirts, having not lately worn any other clothes but them.
h) Once upon a time, before I knew anything about the subject, a woman told me that I should write a book about the lighter side of losing a child.
(This is not that book.)
i) “Before they allowed your father to be a priest,” my mother tells me, “they made me take the Psycopath Test.”
j) Nanda was on her way to the Convent of the Five Wounds.
k) Three forces carved the landscape of my life. Two of them crushed half the world.
l) Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
The question of self-pity.
Which authors and books do they go with?
Patricia Lockwood: Priestdaddy
Joan Didion: The Year of Magical Thinking
Samuel Pepys diaries
Frank Zappa: The Real Frank Zappa Book
Heda Margolius Kovaly: Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941-1968
Shirley Jackson: Raising Demons
Maya Angelou: I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings
Simone de Beauvoir: Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
Jung Chang: Wild Swans
Anaïs Nin: The Journals of Anaïs Nin, Volume I
Elizabeth McCracken: An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination
Antonia White: Frost In May
Where’s the Substack Memoir tab?
On Substack I am mainly reading – and writing – memoir of one sort or another.
If you’re seeing this on the app, you might notice that Substack has Discovery tabs so you can find more of what you like to read, and I couldn’t help noticing that there isn’t one for Memoir. Literature seems too vast a category.
So I’ve asked Substack for a Memoir tab. We’ll see what happens! I’m grateful to
, who expanded my thread on Substack Notes to her own network, to find out who is writing memoir. It led to a flurry of great recommendations. If you’re interested in expanding who to follow or subscribe to on Substack, check out that thread, which is here.I’m nervous of making my own list, because I know I’d accidentally miss someone I love off it! But I’ll give a shout out to
. She asked me What’s in the Wendy’s World jar? just after I started writing here. That set the ball rolling, and before I knew it I’d written several more pieces.Since then I’ve read all four of her published memoirs, which are full of gem-like life-snippets, and terrific advice for memoir writers, including this, on p187 of Still Life at Eighty:
The most important thing writing has taught me is this: the more vulnerable you allow yourself to be, the stronger you become … When you drag the shameful thing out of the dark, its power lessens. It is finite. It has edges.
So when you write about your life, don’t skip over the hard parts.
Amen to that. What all the memoirists I love have in common is their honesty and boldness.
© Wendy Varley 2024
Which memoirs stick in your mind? If you’re a regular on Substack, who are your favourite memoirists, diarists or life-writers here? Do you write memoir yourself? Feel free to include a link to a favourite Substack piece of your own – or by another writer – in the comments.
My essay last week about four generations of my family playing outdoors attracted some fantastic comments about childhoods past, some long ago, some not so distant. I loved
’s account of how she got so grubby playing out that she had to be hosed down before she was allowed in the bath!There was a lot of appreciation for my late dad, Frank Varley’s, anecdotes about his 1930s childhood. He would have been so pleased to know they were being read. I’ll likely share some more of his real-life adventures at a later date.
Thanks everyone for reading, and do please like, comment and share! And if you’re not already a subscriber and like what you’re reading here, do please sign up!
Till next time!
Memoir first line quiz answers:
a) 8. Simone de Beauvoir
b) 4. Frank Zappa
c) 6. Shirley Jackson
d) 7. Maya Angelou
e) 9. Jung Chang
f) 10. Anaïs Nin
g) 3. Samuel Pepys
h) 11.
i) 1. Patricia Lockwood
j) 12. Antonia White
k) 5. Heda Margolius Kovaly
l) 2. Joan Didion
Sharp as a tack Wendy. I was half expecting Eamon Andrews. I loved that Pentangle track. Thank you for highlighting the beauty of memoirs and yours are always insightful. Let’s hope that Substack gets on board. You’re always introducing me to good writers. Thank you.
What a treat this was! I have always loved memoir and devoured the Simone de Beauvoir when I was a student. I loved May Sarton's too and, if letters count too, the Lyttleton - Hart Davis letters were wonderful.