Memoir-writing

On the radio I heard someone talking about memoir-writing. I pricked up my ears and listened closely. Lately I've been reading the fascinating memoirs Karen Trollope Kumar has written about the years that she and her husband Pradeep lived and worked in the Garhwal Himalayas. Recently I've also reread Wendy's lovely memoir of her Depression era childhood on the outskirts of Christchurch, New Zealand - regretting yet again that we never persuaded her to carry her story on to later childhood, an abortive attempt to study nutrition and dietetics at university level, nursing training and working as a nurse in New Zealand, Scotland, private nursing in Scotland and England, and nursing in Australia. Fragments of the last part of this phase of her life are revealed in her diaries, which also record her meeting with me. Karen's memoirs and Wendy's are far more vibrant with life than my dull record. I began writing this in the early 1990s, revised, updated and expanded it about 10 years later, and now I am thinking about another attempt to breathe life into this moribund document, which reads more like a boring textbook than the story of a life that has been tremendous fun, very interesting, and once or twice has helped in a miniscule way to shape public policy. The radio talk, which I heard only partly, touched on the extent to which memoirs should include or suppress sordid and seamy truths about the writer. My memoirs contain a couple of sordid truths about myself, although I've omitted a few other episodes of which I'm deeply ashamed. What I heard of this morning's radio conversation implied that an honest memoir writer would include warts and all. I think this requires a debate, and if as I intend to, I take a course in memoir writing this fall, it's one aspect I will be eager to learn more about.