Narrative Voice in Lifewriting
University Essay for an Advanced Nonfiction Module in Second Year, Semester One. Final Mark: 78.
Content Warnings: passing references to; caesarean, drunk driving, incest, near-death experiences in a plane and on water, child abuse and neglect. [19th Nov 2020, 2,452 words]
One of the most difficult aspects of lifewriting is making good creative choices about the type of narrative voice you use. In this essay, I will analyse; I am I am I am, by Maggie O’Farrell (2017), My Name Is Why, by Lemn Sissay (2019), and The Chronology of Water (2010), by Lidia Yuknavitch. Considering the different techniques these three authors have used, I will explain how they have helped me navigate reliability, likability, cliché, and using experimental and poetic language in lifewriting.
My journey with lifewriting started when I got a new therapist a couple of years ago. She wanted me to create a ‘life timeline’ and I was like, okay nice, if I ever write a memoir this is part of the prep work done. But when I wrote out my memories, I found large gaps in time, inconsistences with when I thought things had happened, and had trouble remembering basic day-to-day details. I was left wondering how I could ever write my memoir with authority as a reliable narrator. On the fourth page of Yuknavitch’s memoir, she says that memory is a series of ‘fragments’ that form ‘without chronology’ (2010, p. 28). She suggests that memory itself is nonlinear and can often be splintered or blurry to us. She goes on to say that the only truly reliable memories are the ones ‘embedded in the brains of people who have lost the ability to retrieve them’, never to end up ‘crafted’ into a piece of nonfiction writing (2010, p. 299). Yet, if I only write what I remember, even as close as I can get it, how can I properly set the scene if I can’t remember basic facts like the colour of a room? In Patricia Hampl’s essay, ‘Memory and Imagination’, she writes out a childhood memory then reflects back on it, stating that she had realised she’d ‘told a number of lies.’ (2005, p. 308) But for Hampl, this isn’t an issue to be solved, instead she gives us permission to ‘create a work of art, not a legal document.’ (2005, p. 313)
However, this realisation that I couldn’t actually write completely reliably about the past, made me lose confidence in telling my personal ‘headstory’, as Yuknavitch puts it. When beginning to write my creative project, I described what my piece was about to my mother and she rejected my story, saying I was ‘painting her in broad strokes’ and misinterpreting her behaviour, that I should be focused on telling the ‘truth’. But the truth depends on who you’re talking to in my family. Writing beyond this project and thinking about publishing to the wider world, I’m wary of entering into a confrontation with people in my life whilst still feeling insecure about the reliability of my own words. In a talk at the Portland Creative Conference, Yuknavitch states that anyone insecure about moving around the world should get, ‘I am not the story you made of me,’ (Cre8con, 2017), tattooed on their forehead. This statement applies to judgments people make about you and your abilities, but also in defiance of the stories that are thrust upon us by the people in our lives. As Michaela Coel said in an interview, if we don’t share our story then ‘it can be erased’ (British GQ, 2020), setting an immediacy to sitting down and writing out our stories before they get lost forever. As Hampl says, no one ‘owns the past’ (2005, p. 314), so why should anyone else have authority over my life-story? This series of lessons has laid my initial concerns about having a reliable narrator to rest. Instead, I am feeling armed with these words to foster an open and honestly unreliable narrative voice.
Writing out my first piece of lifewriting at university, I tried to put in a present tense, mature reflective voice, but my tone ended up unlikable. In a section where I was trying to impart my concluding thoughts, it sounded like I was trying to shove a moral lesson down the reader’s throat. Where I was trying to make passing comments on a character’s personality, I ended up sounding mean and judgmental. But I couldn’t just leave the piece without this form of narrative voice. It was clear to me that, at least in this piece, ‘the voice of the present interpreting and contextualizing the past,’ was a ‘crucial element’ in my piece. (Manifold, 2016) Reading Sissay’s memoir, I felt myself put off by the narrative tone. Trying to find an example where I felt that disconnect, I came across a sarcastic reflective response Sissay had, after reading an insulting report from his headmaster; ‘I hadn’t realised at any point that none of what I have told you so far is true. I wasn’t a happy child. I was a deceitful one… It must be true.’ (2019, loc. 369) In context of the passage, this line comes across as bitter. Wondering if I was just having a personality clash with the narrative voice, I read a section in Patti Miller’s book where she says that if the narrator’s ‘tone of voice is whining, accusing or bitter, then most people will find your words unpalatable.’ (2019, loc. 1677) Thinking back to O’Farrell’s memoir, I looked up the part where a doctor implies that O’Farrell is asking for a Caesarean because she is, ‘some kind of malingering coward, trying to lie my way into an easy birth… Did I realise that a Caesarean was a major surgery? No, I thought it was a stroll in the park.’ (2017, p. 81) Rather than sounding bitter, the tone and content of O’Farrell’s sarcastic comment is more specifically targeted to the idiot in question and lands in a more jovial way. This comparison really illustrated for me the importance of tone when it comes to the reflective voice and creating a likable narrator. Sarcasm in particular, can be very useful to show personality, but it can also be misinterpreted or off-putting if not carefully used.
Another thing to consider with my creative project, was whether to include the parts that paint me in a bad light. Voice comes into this when deciding the tone of the telling. Kori Morgan gives the example of ‘death of a grandmother’. The narrator might have a ‘sober tone to describing losing her’ or a ‘grateful tone’ looking back on happy memories. (Morgan, 2016) Each of these paint the narrator’s personality in a particular light. Should we always choose the smoothed over, happy ending tone? Will this always increase likability? Yuknavitch poses this very question to the reader. After hitting a pregnant woman’s car whilst drunk driving, she doesn’t tell us whether the baby makes it or not; ‘She held her belly and rocked and wept.’ (2010, p. 216) Instead she leaves us in that state of unknowing, leaving it up to the reader to pass judgment: shut the book in horror, or carry on reading. If this woman and her baby were actually okay, Yuknavitch could have eased the way for the reader to forgive and forget. But by lingering on this unknown, Yuknavitch holds herself accountable for the what if consequences of drunk driving. Does this increase her likability through her accountability? Or would it have been better to immediately resolve her of consequence? These are big questions that will depend on who is reading the book, but this example has shown me that even the tone the narrator takes when it comes to accountability can affect the overall likability of the narrator. Telling a complex character that isn’t ‘perfect’ is important to me because it’s realistic. The standards are so high in society to have an Instagram-able flawless life, but by airing out my own dirty laundry, I take a stab at undoing what has been done and let people know that it’s okay if they fuck up.
Writing scenes with sudden moments of violence, tragedy or trauma can be really difficult. Part of the problem with these dramatic scenes is that they have been written so many times. When common stories have been told, they have a tendency to become cliché, no matter how personal they actually are. After having her work read in a writing group Yuknavitch attended, one of the members stated that Yuknavitch’s story was ‘cliché’ because, ‘the incest narrative has been marketed and disseminated to such an extent that it’s running out of meaning.’ (2010, p. 306) This raises the issue on how to go about using narrative voice to tell these big life events in fresh and potentially unusual ways. This is very relevant to me, because my story includes moments of violence. Fortunately, this is exactly what O’Farrell has expertise in doing. In her memoir, O’Farrell tells her seventeen brushes with death. In almost all of these experiences, instead of closing in on the panic and terror of the moment, O’Farrell extracts her emotion and tells these stories clinically. Nearly getting her head hit by a passing truck, ‘she is sensible of the wheel arch skimming the top of her cranium.’ (2017, p. 154) Her plane starting to plummet, ‘I am suffused, preoccupied, distracted by the physical, the deafening noise of the aircraft.’ (2017, p. 57) By taking away her terror in these moments, O’Farrell lets the reader fill in the gaps and feel their own instinctive and emotional response to the events she experiences. For me, this made the passages feel even more powerful because the emotion wasn’t forced upon me. Showing the importance of considering distance as a way to draw the reader’s emotion in.
Similarly, Yuknavitch keeps us suspended in the moment before her body makes contact with the rocks after freeing herself from her overturned kayak. She describes how the ‘boulders bigger than bodies rose up dark black jade and shimmered with the sun moving through layers of deep water.’ (2010, p. 150) Then shows the effect of the cold water making her ‘temples pound’ and hands go numb. This goes on for a whole page before the sudden action and violence of impact. The detachment from emotion and step towards the world of the visual and physical, helps the reader develop a specific sensation of place and setting. Rather than just talking about gasping for breath and panicking, Yuknavitch uses this detached narrative voice to move away from cliché. Both O’Farrell and Yuknavitch have taught me a valuable lesson on how to approach graphic or dramatic moments, and I am less afraid of coming across as dramatic or cliché when writing them.
But what if I want to get close and intimate emotionally in a traumatic scene, and detachment isn’t possible? There are limits to basic descriptors like ‘grief’ ‘fear’ ‘love’ and ‘pain’. Joseph maintains that we have to reach into the world of the metaphor in order to capture the emotionally indescribable. They say that pain ‘requires that we become translators and interpreters.’ The narrator imparts how a woman dying from bone cancer says her, ‘bone breaking was an opening… the cage cracking was the only way she could fly free.’ (Gutkind, 2012, p. 175) Using this metaphor, we see that this woman translates her pain into something understandable and serving in her goal of death. Indeed, Yuknavitch states that, ‘poetic language… is probably the closest we bring language to experience, [it] takes you to the edge of sense and deep into sensation.’ Shaking Kathy Acker’s hand after a lecture, Yuknavitch describes how Acker’s ‘hand in mine was wet… Wet with all of our slobbering projections of who we wanted her to be dripping from her hands.’ (2010, p. 161) Using metaphor like Joseph, Yuknavitch entwines her physiological and psychological to precisely describe how she felt in that moment. This is something that I have often found myself doing, but I have pulled back because I worry about leaving the reader confused. But I am emboldened by Yuknavitch’s determination to have us ‘hear how it feels to be me inside a sentence. Even if some of the sentences seem to lose their meaning.’ (2010, p. 298)
Even further into the realm of experimental use of language, Yuknavitch drops almost all punctuation in her narrative voice for five pages, attempting to truly capture the craziness inside ten years of a marriage. Yuknavitch says, ‘where are you where is the man who would love a woman like me there are no men if not you there never were any men for me not even a father’ (2010, p.179). Throughout the passage, her lack of punctuation conveys the experience that her years were cascading rapidly, uncontrollably, as her life spiralled out of control. Her use of repetition adds to this sense of disorientation as activities go and return again throughout at a dizzying frequency. This also identifies and clarifies the biggest themes reoccurring during her life at the time, so the reader doesn’t lose sense of the overarching incidents.
Sissay also uses repetition to convey his sense of desperation to avoid mistreatment. In his early years, when his ‘life became a set of systems and my existence was defined by how well I performed them.’ (2019, loc. 948) He would practise his ‘big ‘hello’ smile, and hold it as long as he could, then try to think of awful things and keep the smile going, ‘Hold the smile. I held my breath. Held the smile. Your fault. I held my breath. Held the smile. Shoulders back. Your fault. Held the smile. Held my breath. My eyes widened till they were about to pop.’ (2019, loc. 819) This section shows how much he had to train himself to hide his inner world with the repetition of ‘held’. By weaving in and repeating his self-critical comment ‘your fault’, Sissay captures the specific emotional feelings of the time and places the reader in that moment with him. Both of these writers use repetition in order to show psychological issues in a subtle way. They have taught me that I can use the diversity of language to write poetically and experimentally in order to capture complex emotion.
In conclusion, I’m feeling a lot more creatively and emotionally confident approaching my narrative voice in lifewriting after reading these texts. More specifically, I gained knowledge in terms of reliability, likability, cliché, and the use of experimental or poetic language. Techniques these writers have used to create voice include; nonlinear narrative structure, writing unreliably, tone in relation to sarcasm and accountability, detaching emotion and using setting as a focus, using metaphor, and punctuation and repetition to capture intense or complicated emotion. This experience has really helped me get further along my journey to writing a big fuck off memoir and I can’t wait to get started.
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British GQ (2020) Michaela Coel: ‘If you don’t show it, it can be erased’ | British GQ. 26 October. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZ_0_DEe_2A (Accessed: 30 October 2020).
Cre8con (2017) Lidia Yuknavitch speaks at the 2017 Portland Creative Conference. 5 October. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG5DYvXChq8 (Accessed: 10 November 2020).
Gutkind, L. (2012) You Can’t Make This Stuff Up: The Complete Guide to Writing Creative Nonfiction – from memoir to Literary Journalism and Everything in Between. Da United States: Capo Lifelong Books.
Hampl, P. (2005) ‘Memory and Imagination’, in In Root, R., Steinberg, M. (ed.4) The Fourth Genre. London: Longman, pp. 306–315.
Manifold. (2016) ‘The Use of the Reflective Voice in Memoir.’ Available at: https://ugapress.manifoldapp.org/read/a-stranger-s-journey-race-identity-and-narrative-craft-in-writing/section/ea147685-bdd9-4386-9b6e-d1087b91a967 (Accessed: 15 November 2020).
Miller, P. (2010) The Memoir Book. Australia: Allen & Unwin.
Morgan, K. (no date) What is Narrative Tone?. Available at: https://penandthepad.com/narrative-tone-1888.html (Accessed: 17 November)
O’Farrell, M. (2017) I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death. United Kingdom: Tinder Press.
Sissay, L. (2019) My Name Is Why. Scotland: Canongate Books.
Yuknavitch, L. (2010) The Chronology of Water. Portland: Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts.
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First-Class Degree (70% -100%)
Upper Second-Class Degree (60% – 69%)
Lower Second-Class Degree (50% -59%)
Third Class Degree (40% -49%)
Fail (0-39%)
Assignment Criteria
Technical skills and presentation to professional standards
● The work is presented to a publishable standard
● If appropriate to the work, referencing is used throughout
● There are no spelling or grammatical errors
Engagement with reader, audience and genre
● The work is accessible and engaging, making a clear connection with its audience
● The tone and style are appropriate to the work
Originality / artistic expression
● The work shows imagination and artistic intent
● The work shows evidence of testing the boundaries of the
form
● The work demonstrates the writer’s engagement with a wide
range of sources
Evidence of research and additional sources used
● The creative work is based on interviews with its subject, primary sources of research, found objects, archives or similar.
