Towards the end of her clearsighted and passionate exploration of the craft of memoir writing, author Lily Dunn quotes memoirists she has interviewed for the book. "I think memoir is a way of dealing with and packaging experience," Julia Bell tells her. "Memoir is kind of greedy and generous at the same time," says Jenn Ashworth. "It is empowering because it is a voice I chose, like a bespoke piece of clothing tailored to fit," says Susanna Crossman. All three are the authors of remarkable recent examples of the genre.
Dunn published her literary memoir Sins of My Father, which documents her childhood and the impact of her father's involvement in the Rajneesh cult of Sannyasins, to critical acclaim in 2022. She is also a creative writing university lecturer and mentor in the UK, and it is this aspect of her practice that alerted her to the absence of a book such as this. Both erudite and utterly conversational in tone, Into Being considers the essential nature of memoir and the complicated landscape authors enter when publishing it in the 21st century. Dunn argues that memoir writing can function as a form of radical transformation, for reader and writer alike.
The best memoirs tell a story that’s compelling not only in its circumstance but in the ways the author navigates the problems of a form Dunn describes as "fascinating, sometimes hazardous". Into Being addresses the very human fallibility of memory, ethics, permission, perceptions of truth, censorship (of self or otherwise), and what it means to publish memoir when we live now "In an age of social media, filled with confessions, re-inventions and distortions of the self", as the cover of Into Being puts it.
Watch: Lily Dunn discusses her memor Sins of My Father
Crucially, Dunn does not see memoir writing as a form of self-help or therapy. She argues any therapeutic outcome, if there is one, "happens accidentally, as a sweet addition to crafting a beautiful piece of writing" and she demonstrates how "all writing – however much it is rooted in real-life experience – is creation." She writes too as an avid reader of a form she loves.
An instinctive writer since childhood – "I discovered writing out of necessity… I could bring life to difficult experience, find meaning in pain, and make it beautiful by turning it into a story" – she includes images of scraps of notes and lines written on napkins, receipts, envelopes and diary pages, kept throughout her life, at the start of each chapter. It’s a practice that will chime with anyone for whom putting words on feelings, ideas and experiences is the best way they’ve found to process them.
She has interviewed more than twenty memoir writers, including Pragya Agarwal, Jade Angeles Fitton, Damian Barr, Richard Beard, Maria Benjamin, Caro Giles, Noreen Masud, Ali Millar, Clover Stroud, Catherine Taylor and Kit de Waal for this book. "Memoir is poison and the cure" Ali Millar tells her. She quotes from other writers on craft: Vivian Gornick, Philip Lopate, Joan Didion – who keeps a notebook to "remember what it was to be me", Leslie Jamison, Melissa Febos, Virginia Woolf, and from memoirs and personal essays by Cheryl Strayed, Alain de Botton, Deborah Levy, Rachel Cusk, and some Irish writers, including Doireann Ní Ghríofa's A Ghost in the Throat, and my memoir Negative Space.
For Dunn, memoir is a tool of not only change, but illumination
She writes of how the memoirist must find a way to be vibrantly present in the past, while "simultaneously standing apart from it to see it in the round". A memoir writer is both in the story, telling the story, and asking the reader to look with them from the outside in at the story. It’s a difficult task and it requires, to paraphrase a sentence from the introduction, honesty, clarity, confidence and distance.
Dunn demonstrates how memoir can offer something bigger and better than a hero/heroine’s journey, clean resolution or happy ever after, because life isn’t like that. She argues that memoir holds the potential for a different kind of satisfaction. Part of it is to do with acknowledging that much of our "innate sense of wisdom about our own lives…is admitting to what is unknowable or unresolvable". She quotes Noreen Masud: "Sometimes memories can be fundamentally incompatible, they contradict each other, they’re impossible, big parts are missing – and that’s normal."
For Dunn, memoir is a tool of not only change, but illumination: "Writing is a kind of alchemy that can release a writer from the straightjacket of how they have perceived themselves." Into Being includes valuable insight into her own experience of drafting, re-drafting and publishing Sins of My Father: a Daughter, a Cult, a Wild Unravelling, and at the end of each chapter, wise, practical exercises, under the heading 'Try this’. It’s a book that is as much a why as it is a how-to. Dunn reveals that there’s no one way to write a great memoir. Success lies somewhere in the shape that forms when instinct meets craft to become art. As self-reflective as it is open-armed in its sharing of knowledge and tips, Into Being becomes a kind of memoir in itself and it will leave you with a towering stack of recommendations on the pile labelled want-to-read-next.
Into Being, The Radical Craft of Memoir and its Power to Transform is published by Manchester University Press
