There are, according to critics, good memoirs and bad ones. Bad ones make their authors, like ‘professional victim’ Dave Pelzer, hundreds of thousands of dollars. A Child Called It remained on the bestseller list for 448 weeks. What is bad is sentimentality and sensational over-indulgence. No memoirist, either (especially if they’re earning tons of money), should be bitter.
Those who write about themselves fall into two camps: sadists and masochists, and it is the sadists, we must presume, who are bad. They ruin literature.
This is a genre for which forgiveness is a highly valued, and a rare commodity. One book chapter on the ethics of misery memoir asks: what are we to do with autobiographers who cannot forgive their parents?
Why should we do anything? Just because these writers cannot forgive, does that really make what they have to say bad? Dave Pelzer’s inability to empathise with his abuser may not be a choice. Neglect literally reduces brain volume. Synaptic pruning, a process which begins in the first one to two years of life, crops axons, dendrites and synapses that have been underused in early childhood. For these children it means shaving love short. Perhaps, rather than being bad, these memoirs are the most honest version of self that they can be, and the most ‘true’.
Am I bad? Even by asking the question, do I haul myself away from giving a truthful account? Or simply reveal myself as desperate to be liked and worried what everyone else thinks? Because I have worried about being good. Being good is often on my mind. I guess in this regard, though, I am bad – I have admitted that I am still struggling to forgive, and even if I haven’t admitted it, my underlying tone will have given me away.
More than forgiveness, it is betrayal that many of those who find themselves subjects of memoir would say is unethical. Being understood comes a distant second when judged against loyalty. These things I have written are private, and the secrets I have told are not mine. In fact loyalty to the Doyles ranks greater than almost anything else. Just as it feels like subjugation to remain dutiful to someone else’s secrets, it is also oppressive when parents and siblings are forced to play a role in a tale they did not write. My brothers may feel as though I’ve hauled them on stage and forced them to speak a series of terrible lines.
I did ask some of my characters (not Adrian, or Sean yet) if they would like a right to reply, but Violet and Ed declined. Perhaps it is more satisfying to feel justifiably pissed off.
Which they will be. The reaction to Karl Ove Knausgaard’s autobiographical My Struggle has included hate mail, death threats and lawsuits. The ‘K’ section of a bookshop was torched. In the Paris Review Knausgaard excuses himself: ‘I was so frustrated that I did not foresee the consequences … There was a certain desperation that made it possible.’ Ignorance is not an excuse I can claim. I have foreseen the consequences, and this must make me look worse. I am rather hoping that, as many of my family are not readers, they won’t notice that this has happened.
Which relies heavily on the extremely generous note that Mum wrote once she was no longer able to speak – ‘Miranda, you have my full permission to write anything you want.’ She, more than anyone else, would want me to forgive.
Yet we are only capable of forgiveness when we fully understand one another. Something I am struggling with. The monumental levels of deceit make it difficult to fathom any truths about my parents’ marriage, their motivations, their selves. I will have left out thoughts, ideas, feelings that were enormously important to them. All I can hope is that what I can’t see – my own ignorance about them and about myself – you can, because it is in this space between me and you, writer and reader, that memoir finds its voice.