I will tell you a secret: a waking life is not enough for a writer. I needed a kind of parallel life to soothe me, to speak for me, to make darkness visible. – SUSAN JOHNSON
You write your life as you live it. Or do you live your life as you write it?
Is there a point when writing memoir becomes your life and the pale shadowy thing other people call ‘real life’ is just raw material? Like waking from a powerful dream and looking about your bedroom in the half-light of dawn, you see its thinness, its weakness after the depth and saturation of your dream. The actor and her actions are not as important as the spectator and her interpretations.
It is appealing because you can perfect your memoir, in the way you cannot your life. Not that you can write perfectly – that will always elude you – but you can transform messy failed moments into delicately poised harbingers of great meaning. Pointless disagreements with your partner can become signals to the astute reader that you are, after all, destined to part. Unprovoked shouting at your son can be a message about contemporary life and the suppressed rage of the marginalised citizen. The cruel words of others can give your story conflict and sharpness. Everything has a point when you write memoir. Or at any rate, you can give anything and everything a point with just a tweak or two. You find language for previously unnamed experiences. You create patterns, unmask meaning.
More than this, you construct a new life. And when you write memoir contemporaneously with living it, you can go far beyond the traditional reconstruction of childhood memories. You can manipulate your life as you live it.
Imagine this: I want to end my memoir with a scene where Ben and I walk down to the local park, a scene that will echo those endless walks counting letterboxes, when I was exhausted and bewildered and sometimes felt that the two of us were like members of a different species. I think it will be a neat ending to my memoir, to revisit that little park with daisies and graffiti and a broken water fountain. It will show how much (or how little) has changed. But we haven’t done this recently (Ben is really too old for this park now). So, do I make it up? Of course not, that would be dishonest. But perhaps I say to him, ‘Ben, let’s walk down to the park today,’ knowing that he is a cooperative sort of boy and will be happy to do this. And then, when we are on our way, perhaps I might say to him, ‘Remember when you were four and we used to come down here all the time?’ So we will talk about those times and he will probably remember something that I have forgotten. And that night, after Ben has gone to bed, I can get out my laptop and write about our walk to the park. I am telling only the truth and I remember it well because it happened only hours ago. I have engineered my neat ending.
My best memoir-writing times were sitting in cafés in West Perth while Ben attended his first therapy sessions. It wasn’t worth going any further afield; parking was always difficult and I couldn’t risk being late to collect Ben. I never was late, but I always imagined I might be and could see him in my mind’s eye, crying in the waiting room – ‘the cage’ – with a nineteen-year-old therapy assistant trying to reassure him. I used to walk to a café, order coffee and cake and write in my journal. At first it was simply a debrief: ‘I’m so tired,’ my entries often started. Once I got into a routine, I started to record things that Ben had said or done – not milestones or therapeutic achievements, but unusual and striking things, amusing comments or behaviour I thought of as particularly Ben-like. I recorded the way he started collecting small packets of jam, honey and vegemite from a local café and then wanted to carry them everywhere, even after they became scuffed and sticky. I noted that he showed me how every power point in our local shopping centre had a number. I reproduced phrases he used, such as ‘You actually don’t want’ and ‘It’s pimpling rain,’ the way he touched his heart when I asked him if he knew what a treasure chest was. I tried to capture his body language when he loped in front of me at the park, picked up a stick and used it to hit different parts of the climbing frame, listening to the different sounds this made. At this stage I was just recording the things that moved or interested me. It wasn’t about remembering them or sharing them. While Ben was at speech therapy, learning the correct usage of pronouns, I was at coffee-shop therapy, learning how to integrate the unexpected, worrying and puzzling aspects of motherhood.
At some point, my secret fiction-writing habit and my therapeutic journal-keeping merged, so that I stopped wanting to write and publish fiction and instead found I wanted to write memoir. I had attended a workshop as part of the Perth Writers’ Festival. Sidonie Smith (an American life-writing scholar) and the Australian writer Drusilla Modjeska gave a combined seminar, followed by separate workshops. The seminar was inspiring. Smith and Modjeska took it in turns to speak, creating a live, partially scripted dialogue. Smith walked around, her American accent projecting to the back of the room. Modjeska sat and spoke quietly into the microphone. The contrast seemed to enhance the impact of their words. I took notes in my journal (by then I never went anywhere without a soft-backed black notebook).
After the seminar, I attended Modjeska’s workshop, where we wrote to some prompts she gave us and she talked about the different ‘I’s in memoir – the participating I, the observing I, the writing I. There was also a discussion about genre and her notion of ‘fictional memoir’, which is how she described her book Poppy. I was already a huge fan of Modjeska’s work and I suddenly realised that for the past few years I had been reading more memoirs and fewer novels than ever before. It was as if my unconscious had been preparing me to write a memoir. After the workshop I asked Modjeska if she thought it was ethical to write about a child, particularly one with a disability like autism. Even at this early stage my biggest concern was about Ben’s privacy. Modjeska referred to John Bayley’s book Iris and how some people thought it was unethical or exploitative but that she felt perhaps our discomfort with the book might be more about what it depicted – for example, the scenes of bodily incontinence. I think she was suggesting that our unease with lack of control over the mind and body might be masquerading as a moral stance on privacy.
By asking that question and getting, in a sense, permission from a writer I admired, I launched myself into writing a memoir. It had to be memoir, not fiction. I knew that, in spite of the looming ethical dilemmas.
From my notebook:
Life writing is about experience and the truth of experience; about memory; about identity or subjectivity; about the creation of a narrative that weaves together these threads of someone’s life.
Experience, truth, memory, identity, narrative – all of these are fundamental to memoir. And all of these are challenged by autism. Autistic people experience sensory input and perception differently from neurotypicals. The memory of an autistic person seems to work differently. Some researchers argue that autistic people have no sense of identity, that they cannot frame their life into a narrative. This is what drove me to write a memoir about my journey as Ben’s mother – because autism seems to challenge so many of the assumptions that underpin our own understanding of our lives and the way we retell them to others.
In my notebook, Modjeska’s question:
What is the shape of a person’s life?
This question I thought about often. I thought about how the shape of my own life had seemed to change radically with the birth of my son and then again when I recognised his difference from other children his age. I wondered if his life would have a special shape because he was autistic.
Also in my notebook:
Memoir – a term encompassing the notion of meditation or reflection as well as remembrance and mourning.
I recognised that my confusion and grief required me to shape a narrative that combined my reflections on mothering with a kind of mourning for my past, my more innocent, careless self.
For over five years now, I have been writing about my experiences as a mother. While I have been writing, my son has grown from five to almost eleven years old, his father and I have separated, I have finished my doctorate, started a new job, lost friends and made new friends, visited my childhood home, published work, watched my mother recover from a stroke. I have been writing about mothering while my own mother is becoming frailer. I have been writing about parenting a child who is different from most other boys his age while I learned about what that difference meant and while he began to see those differences himself. I have been writing about autism while the Australian community has gone from near total ignorance about it to a widespread understanding of its basic features.
Over time, the writing and the living have started to fold in upon each other. I’m not sure what my life would feel like without the act of witnessing, crafting and sharing the daily moments. Writing has become so much a part of my mothering role, how can I relinquish it? How will I understand my own life and treasure my son’s life if I don’t write about it? Many people have written about the impossibility of memoir – its unseemliness, vulgarity, narcissism, betrayals – but where is the literature on the impossibility of life without memoir?
Paradoxically, writing memoir relies more on forgetting than remembering. In order to write about events or experiences that are meaningful, you have to release all of the other moments that you don’t write about. I think back over the past ten years. About our crumpled crying baby who didn’t know how to suck or sleep. About the toddler with a rigid body and stony face, sitting on his own in a room full of laughing, playing children. The child mesmerised by the alphabet, terrified by noises, trying to pull smells out of his mouth. All the doctors and their tests and questions, the therapists with their advice and instructions. The one hundred books on autism I have read. I think of toilet training and load after load of washing in winter. Of red wine all over the kitchen floor, a river running out of the bathroom, the broken window in the laundry. Meetings at the school, explaining, negotiating, urging. The obsessions with numbers, Bananas in Pyjamas, drains, toilet flush buttons, swimming pools, dinosaurs, Mr Men characters, frogs, Thomas the Tank Engines, measuring tapes, thermometers. Long walks reading letterboxes. Endless conversations about numbers and trains and swimming pools. Doubts and confusion, decisions I’ve had to make without adequate information. I think about all the injuries I have done to Ben, all the things I insisted he must do: swing, go down slides, go to the dentist, have a haircut, attend childcare, learn to swim, have a blood test, interact with other children. I think about the hard things I’ve had to tell Ben: that he’s autistic, that he needs extra help, that he is different from his peers. I think about those four months of depression the year after his diagnosis, when just getting through the day was a struggle. I think about the long road out of that place.
All these things happened. Some I have written about.
I think also about how every morning Ben wakes up happy and optimistic. His amazing courage and enthusiasm for life. How he loves school and learning. How many people he has won over with his politeness, humour and affection. Little things he says that are so characteristic, like asking me, ‘When I eat crisps, do I look chic?’ or saying that for breakfast he had ‘toast and mushrooms under salt’. I worry I haven’t been able to convey his deeper, more thoughtful side – how at four he said, ‘I was born in space in the dark’ and at eight we had many conversations about death and the mechanics of how the dead, once buried, could reach heaven or be reincarnated.
I wonder if I have communicated the complex and unusual boy he has become and how his view of the world has changed me. All my life, I’ve been missing things that Ben has shown me – the shape of shells, the number of petals on flowers, the colour of swimming pools, the different types of clouds, the way some words have no antonyms, the number of words that are spelled in three different ways in English, the different fonts used in children’s picture books, the fact that people lie to one another all the time, why it is that bullying thrives, our daily acceptance of malice.
Jane Smiley notes that ‘one of the trials of intimacy with a writer’ is ‘to be observed in detail’. But is it always a trial to be observed so closely? Perhaps it can also be a gift to be watched with interest and compassion by someone who loves us. To watch your own child so closely is a privilege but, as most parents know, also at times a shocking experience. Your fond notions of how important you are to the child, the good grounding you gave him in cultural matters, the disdain for material possessions, the sceptical but compassionate view of the world you passed on to him – these may be more projections than realities.
Because he seemed at times so different from me, so puzzling to me, I have observed Ben very closely all his life. And because he recognises that other people are confusing and cannot be taken at face value, Ben observes me rather closely. We allow each other some privacy – we have secrets from each other – but we are a little knowing about these secrets.
‘Why are you doing a sneaky smile?’ asked Ben the other day.
‘I’m smiling because you are smiling in a cheeky way,’ I replied. ‘I think you might be about to do something naughty!’
‘Mum!’ he protested, trying not to laugh, his face alight with the prospect of breaking one of our minor house rules. (Or so I thought: later I discovered he had already played his trick on me – swapping the knobs of the salt and pepper grinders.)
I have started reading sections of my memoir to Ben. Like all children, he loves to hear stories about his own past. Because he also loves reading and writing, he understands that some of my writing includes him, using the name Ben, not his real name. The scenes I read to him are all moments that I think he will enjoy, for example the time when he was two and didn’t want to swing or play in the sandpit but enjoyed being inside a cave. Not long ago, I read Ben the scene where Robert and I were trying to enforce our rule that he couldn’t talk about numbers while at dinner. Ben loved it. He fell about laughing and asked me to give him a copy to read himself. After he’d reread it, we talked about why we’d tried to stop him talking about numbers all the time. Then he said, ‘Mum, it’s good that I don’t spit rice on the table any more and run away, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it is good. And it’s also good that we talk about all sorts of things at dinner now, isn’t it?’ He didn’t reply but looked at me through suddenly narrowed eyes.
Later that day, as we sat down to our dinner together, he gave me a sly grin and said, ‘Mum, did you know there is something called the Fibonacci series? I’ll tell you about it.’ And he insisted I listen to a sequence of numbers and how they are calculated.
I see this as his way of re-interpreting my writing. At one level, he is now old enough to accept that not everyone loves numbers (or whatever his current interest is) and that if he wants good relationships, he needs to be able to discuss things other than his latest passion. On another level, it is clear that he is telling me that he is not going to give up his interest in numbers just to please me, nor is he buying into the idea that the superficial and generalist interests of neurotypicals are superior to the highly specialised interests of autistic people.
He isn’t yet challenging the way I have represented him. But I expect he will. In fact, I hope he will. Writing a memoir about a mother–son relationship while living that relationship was always going to be tricky, not just in terms of ethics but also on questions of ‘truth’, on how the interactions between us can justifiably be interpreted. Since my starting premise was the idea of difference, it seems appropriate that Ben’s understanding of our relationship will not only be different from my own but will also involve a critique and reconstruction of my interpretations. Whether he’ll ever do this through writing, I don’t know, but I can see he is already doing so through living.
There is another challenge in writing about mothering when your son is still young, and that is how to end your memoir. I don’t want to predict Ben’s future, because that isn’t my role. Ben will determine his own future. I have no advice for other parents, no words of wisdom to end on. So I have to fall back on my old strategy – the question.
‘Ben, if you were writing a story about your life so far, like a book, how would you end it?’ I ask him.
‘How many pages would it have?’ he replies.
This is such a typical response, I smile. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Three hundred, maybe.’
He frowns slightly and then corrects me. ‘I think it will be 220 pages, like that Morris Gleitzman book we’ve just finished reading.’
‘Okay, yes, 220 pages would be good. So, how would you end it?’
‘Page 150 would probably be when you decided to move me from my old school to my new school. Page 220 would be that I’m settling in very well.’
‘That’s a good ending, Ben,’ I say. ‘Do you mind if I write that down?’
‘No, Mum, I don’t mind,’ he says.
And so I do.