Book Launch Photos

Here are some photos my sister (Helen) has just sent me of the book launch for "Take Me Home", which took place in Loughborough Town Hall on 23rd July 2007.

My family: Ben (Helen's fiance), my sister Helen, my sister Karen, Bruce (my elder sister's fiance), me, Maria, my mother, my brother Robin.

Me and Maria.

Me and Maria again.

Maria.

Sue Mackrell, Maria and David McCormack (after a few drinkies).

A paradoxical dedication

Last week, I was teaching on the M.A. in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University, which was fun, if a little strange, in that one never meets the students but chats to them via the keyboard: a disembodied experience which was strangely more intense than a real-life seminar ... in a good way.

Anyway, the subject of discussion was memoirs, and I was asked about the dubious ethical status of memoirs, and writing about other people. These questions always come up when it comes to memoirs for good reason: they are the central questions posed by the genre. If you're not tortured, or at least exercised, by the moral questions posed by the genre, then you shouldn't be writing memoirs, as far as I'm concerned.

In my book, the dedication reads: "This book is dedicated to my father, John Taylor (1928?-2001), who would probably have hated it." Obviously, this dedication itself poses all sorts of ethical and moral problems. Should I have written a book about my father if he would have hated it?

When my brother first read the book, he said to me: "Well, yes, dad would have hated the book when he was ill, given the paranoia and paranoiac fear of being talked about in the local papers or elsewhere. But, if he'd been well, he would have liked the book, because when he was well, he loved writing and reading." My father was, after all, a very cultured man.

So this makes the book a deeply paradoxical enterprise.

Put it this way: when he was ill, in the early 1990s, my father used to come into the dining room (where I was typing fantasy-science-fiction), shouting: "HE'S WRITING ABOUT US, YOU KNOW! HE'S GOING TO EXPOSE US IN HIS WRITING!" ... and he was proved right retrospectively by the future, but not at the time, when the thought of writing about my own family hadn't even crossed my mind (Tolkienesque fantasy seeming more relevant to my life back then).

But, as my brother says, before he was ill and paranoid, perhaps he would have loved the book ... the problem being that then the book would not have been possible or conceivable. After all, the book is partly about his illness, dementia, Parkinson's, paranoia. My father would have loved the book when he was well, but the book is posited on the fact of his latter-day illness. So the book is a strangely impossible paradox in ethical terms. My father would have loved a book which is partly about an illness which would have made him hate it, if you see what I mean. Or, in other words (and there are so many ways of putting this), he would have loved a book which is about a later self who would have hated it. Or my father would have loved a book if he could have gone forwards in time as he was before the illness, read it, and then gone back to experience the horrendous illness so it could have been written at all.

These are the kind of ethical ambiguities and time-travelling paradoxes and questions that memoir-writers have to confront. I don't think there're any simple answers, and I don't have any to offer.

Video nation et al

Here's a tiny video I did for BBC Leicester:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/leicester/content/articles/2007/09/28/vn_carersmemories_video_feature.shtml

... and here's a blurb about the book from Leicestershire's reading groups:

http://www.leicestershire.gov.uk/index/community/libraries/reading_writing/reading_groups/reading_circles_booklist_introduction/reading_circkle_booklist_four.htm

... and here's a mention of Take Me Home on David Morley's blog for Warwick Writers:

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/writingprog/warwickwritingnews/

... and here's a blurb for an interview I did with BBC Wales:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/radiowales/sites/jamieowen/updates/20070806.shtml

... and here's a review that appeared in the Irish Times:

http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/weekend/2007/0630/1183047373579.html

Writing as catharsis

"Storytelling is always after the fact, and is always constructed over a loss."

(J. Hillis Miller)

Every time I do a reading or an interview about my memoir, Take Me Home, people ask: "Was it therapeutic writing the book?" Given the subject-matter - my father's Parkinson's disease, dementia and my (part-time) experience of caring for him - the question is an obvious one, and one which I often asked myself whilst I was writing it: "Is this making me feel any better?"

To be honest, I have no idea what the answer is. Probably, it was cathartic writing the book, insofar as I often burst into tears whilst doing it - although that made me want to give up. Suddenly, it'd dawn on me the magnitude of what I was doing, and all the old, nagging ethical questions would raise their gorgon heads and stare my writing self to stone. Even when I was three-quarters of the way through the first draft, I almost gave the whole thing up, because there was a bit too much "catharsis" so-called.

But that's obviously not the same as making me feel better. I think it'd be rather selfish, rather egocentric if all I was doing in writing the book was making myself feel better about my father's illness. Now, if writing could have made my father better, that would be a different matter. Then writing the memoir would be properly "therapeutic," and writing itself a more crucial enterprise.

But no, writing can't do that. It can only pretend to bring someone back to life, make things better. And it does that by reconstructing a past, reimagining it, turning it into a story, a narrative, with a form and direction, beginning, middle and end. It's in that sense that writing is "therapeutic": it reshapes the past and imbues it with sense, logic, meaning, narrative. Whilst the present is always chaotic and stupid and confused and there and gone, the past can be reshaped into something meaningful - and that's what writing does. Of course, it means that writing is at heart nothing but a pack of lies or, at best, half-truths. But they're the only half-truths available in a world where the present is ungraspable, been and gone before you can say "Parkinson's disease."