Perilous Memoirs

Published: 18/01/2010

Perilous Memoirs
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown


In the last decades a large number of best sellers have been victim tales of appalling suffering in the hands of loved adults. A whole new genre- misery memoirs- had arrived. Several of the published versions have been contested by family members and some cases have gone to court. The most high profile of these was that of Constance Briscoe the barrister who claimed to have been viciously abused by her British Jamaican mother. The mother sued her and lost. Nothing can ever be the same again when you publish your family saga. That doesn’t stop anyone and never will. The need to tell the world is a compulsion.

Lady Antonia Fraser has just published Must You Go? My Life With Harold Pinter, a year after her husband died of cancer. Evocative and intense, it was deservingly book of the week on Radio4. But not easy. Read by the author, I was uncomfortable at times to be overhearing the intimacies of a fiery marriage, and wearied of the tiresome parade of celebs the powerful would pack a whole issue of Hello!. None of that diminished the beauty of the writing and the fascinating love story. I once sat next to Pinter at a dinner for a worthy charity at Buckingham Palace. Lady Antonia Fraser was on the opposite side and you could feel the heat of passion passing between them, over the hunks of meat and fine glasses. She has been able to describe that un-containable attraction down on paper, a remarkable feat.

A number of critics are disapproving of the timing. So soon too soon, really, a bit improper they tut. tut, sounding like the gossipy ladies of Cranfield. Others have more serious misgivings. She is jumping on to the memoir gravy train, is an egocentric, ‘upper class totty’, ‘self indulgent.’ An authentic memoir stirs people, make them uneasy, partly because there is something ‘unnatural’ about turning a subjective lived experience into pictures and words, ordering life’s chaos and selling it as a perfectly formed product.

The most un-censorious find themselves questioning Fraser’s seeming indifference to her painfully gentlemanly ex-husband and Pinter’s estranged son and first wife, the talented actress Vivien Merchant who died subsequently of alcoholism. Her own children are not best pleased. That is the price you must be ready to pay. You must be prepared too for the mental and emotional fallout as you try to excavate your memories. Martin Amis says his whole metabolism collapsed’ was writing his autobiography. It was the exhaustion of ‘communing with your significant dead.’ I just saw The Boys are Back, the film based on Simon Carr’s heartbreaking and yet affirming account of the death of his young wife and the years when he was a lone, wild dad of two boys. Although the film was happy ending ever after, in his memoir one gets the shadows, the anger and aches that become part of the flesh almost.

The best published recollections are those that take risks, edgily hover between control and collapse. Like Hanif Kureshi writing on his father, Lorna Sage’s unbearably honest Bad Blood, Claire Bloom’s avenging tome about her fraght marriage to ex-husband Phillip Roth. The fallout such accounts whips up more attention that the book.

After I published a rushed book about my life in 1997, six relatives stopped talking to me then. Some were not missed. The ladies in mosque gave my mum, Jena, endless grief about her wicked daughter who had dug up family sagas that should be forever buried. Like interred bodies I had made a terrible stench. I promised Jena I would not be so impetuous again. Then she died and I broke the promise, partly because I wanted her unspoken agonies and ecstasies not to go into the grave. My second memoir The Settler’s Cookbook has seen off more mortified friends and family. I can’t understand why there is always so much overreaction to descriptions of real people and events.

One ghastly relative did have conspicuous hips and coarseness money couldn’t refine. And a cousin did abuse and beat his young wife with coat hangers leaving her black and blue. And my father though a clever and kind man, was a gambler and wastrel who never understood how much he hurt us. I did lose myself for a while when I came into Britain the early seventies, a time, like now, of social abandon and no restraint. And I did, in the name of love, stupidly put up with spousal serial infidelity in my first marriage. And I did learn to flirt from my delightful mum. Why shouldn’t I be able to say and write all that? It is the truth, or at least what I remember to be true, or maybe an edited version to favour me, the heroic memoir writer. We are all heart and heartless; honest yet sometimes unconsciously deceitful. We tell our stories because we can, because we must. Stuff the rest.

Published in The Independent