Extract from ‘THE AESTHETIC MEMOIR: JULIA BELL ON MENTORING AND TEACHING MEMOIR’
Lily Dunn interviews Julia Bell – Full text Here.
Could you tell us your opinion on the kinds of memoirs that work, compared to when it might not work?
Ambulance chasing memoirs don’t work – like the Natascha Kampusch book, 3096 Days, about her experience being abducted, held captive in the secret cellar in Austria for eight years. It was published soon after she was saved, but basically written by a journalist. Her story was completely unexpurgated – it was horrible, a victim story, like a statement for the police essentially. And then Emma Donoghue takes that idea and creates art from it with Room. But Natasha’s book came first. I felt prurient reading it, because it was so unprocessed. Compared to something that has been really rigorously thought through – your book is a really good example of that – but other books are Tara Westover’s Educated, or Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments. Here you have an intelligent mind that is able to be nuanced about what has happened to them, not just simply trying to get revenge. I think this is the issue also – what is the purpose of the writer writing this book, why are they telling this story?
I think with Sins of My Father, you had to live it as well as write it. You couldn’t just sit down and synthesise. Life happens in the process of making art. Shit happens. And life affects the art. Maybe more so in memoir than fiction.
Can you give readers any tips if they are writing memoir and are struggling with it?
Ask yourself, why am I writing this story? What is the point of it? Maybe the sticking point is who is the person speaking or what is my time management? Sometimes writers tell everything in the first three paragraphs and then think they have run out of things to say. See if the events can be dug into more deeply than that. Take the reader into the moment and make them sit in that situation with you.
If you’d like to learn more about writing narrative nonfiction, Julia will be doing three masterclasses with London Lit Lab in the autumn, and you can book them here. If you book all three you get a £20 discount.
If you want to buy my memoir, Sins of My Father, you can do so here: