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Truth, Structure, and the English Way
Truth:
These are the stories of my earliest days — from six months old to twenty-nine — illustrated
and occasionally obscured by pieces of juvenilia: old poems, crayon drawings,
songs, stories (even, for your delectation and delight, scratch 'n'
sniff panels). Appended to these pieces are essays and anecdotes of my
Bad Self days, before I moved to the US, settled down and became the
respectable married neighbour who writes novels.
So, all these tall tales — the knives, the drugs, the arson, the gay bashing,
the paranoia and police harassment — are they true? Yes. Every single
word. Mostly. Some of the dates are a bit fuzzy (how much do you remember
after drugs and alcohol and adrenalin rush?) and here and there I've
obscured a name because, frankly, I don't want to be sued. However, I've
done my best to be clear about when I'm not being clear.
I can't attest to the truth, though, of those early family rumours of disinherited
wealth, or tragic death. I believed it then, so, in terms of how it affected
me, it was reality. And that's what this book is about: what formed me,
and how.
Nor can I speak to the truth of how other people felt or what they thought.
I can tell you what stories I told myself of their interior process when
it was happening, and I can paraphrase some of our conversation, but
this is a memoir, not transcript. There is bound to be inaccuracy and,
naturally, artistic licence. We make sense of our lives by telling stories
about it. As we change, the stories tend to change too. No doubt — and I mean that,
I have no doubt at all — others' accounts of these same events will
differ.
Structure:
With fiction, I'm a structure fanatic, with a particular fondness for
symmetry. This book is different. Memory doesn't work neatly, so I haven't
tried to shoehorn these stories into a rigid architecture. Besides, the
longer and more coherent — more novelistic, if you like — a
memoir narrative is, the more the writer tends to bend the facts to fit
the form. When I was first pondering this project, I thought I'd talk
about the individual juvenile pieces (poem, or song, or picture) one
by one, and just go with the flow as the memories welled up. That didn't
work, though, because my parents, who collected and saved most of these
pieces, had a very whimsical notion of completeness; there are vast gaps.
So I wrote a few short essays to cover those earlier years.
This means the narrative structure is lopsided. There is a definite metamorphosis
from essay to brief commentary at the point when, in my early twenties,
I started to write fiction, and to keep odd scribbles. It's at this point
that I begin to let the words — the poems and lyrics and diary entries — speak
for themselves. The change is abrupt, quite startling, as was my own
personal change from unconscious human to conscious artist. Abrupt, but,
I hope, pleasing.
With a couple of exceptions I've done my best to place each piece of
juvenile art, whether poem, picture or song, in chonological order of
creation. That's how I experienced them and if I want you to understand
my life, that's the way you get to experience them, too. Perhaps paradoxically,
I have made absolutely no attempt to maintain the veil of time separation.
For example, I talk, in a piece about a poem I wrote when I was eleven,
about how my English teacher's advice still influences my work today.
Memoir — life,
story — is a living thing.
The English Way:
This is not a tell-all, it's a tell-some. I'm English. Not only was I brought
up not to talk too much about myself (it just Wasn't Done), it was made
clear to me that one should speak of others kindly, or not at all. Where
possible (and isn't that a slippery little phrase?) I've done my best to
follow this advice.
Fortunately for this project, my life falls conveniently (at least if you
tilt your head and squint) into two parts: before I moved to the US to
live with Kelley and after. This book sticks entirely to my life in the
UK, in Yorkshire. That sometimes feels like another life in a galaxy far,
far away, almost as though I'm talking about another person, not me at
all.
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