Text-Type: Memoir

As you read a variety of texts you may be intrigued by memoirs. For the WT 1, memoirs work very well. You may decide to write the memoirs of a character from a literary work that you read for Part 3 or 4. You may also come across a memoir or autobiographical piece on the Paper 1 exam. For these reasons, it is good to familiarise yourself with the conventions of memoir writing.

Memoirs are easily confused with autobiographies. While all memoirs are autobiographical, not all autobiographies are memoirs. Memoirs are reflections upon one’s life, including the life lessons that can be gleaned from a section of one’s life. They are story-like and anecdotal, while autobiographies are the retelling of one’s own history.

William Zinsser in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of a Memoir offers this definition:

"Unlike autobiography, which moves in a dutiful line from birth to fame, memoir narrows the lens, focusing on a time in the writer's life that was unusually vivid, such a childhood or adolescence, or that was framed by war or travel or public service or some other special circumstance."  

Here are several characteristics that you will want to consider when analysing or writing memoir.

• Writing that is focused on either a certain event, time or place

• Writing that consists mainly of feelings or revealing truths

• Written in first person perspective 

• Writing that makes the subject come alive

Try to identify these four elements of in the two passages below, both taken from memoirs. The first is from Lorna Sage's Bad Blood.

So the playground was hell: Chinese burns, pinches, slaps and kicks and horrible games. I can still hear the noise of a thick wet skipping rope slapping the ground. There's be a big girl at each end and you had to leap through without tripping. Joining in was only marginally less awful than being left out. It is said (truly) that most women forget the pain of childbirth; I think that we all forget the pain of being a child at school for the first time, the sheer ineptitude, as though you'll never learn to mark out your own space. It's doubly shaming -- shaming to remember as well, to feel so sorry for your scabby little self back there in small people's purgatory. 

Comment: We see all four defining elements of this text-type:

* narration in the first-person perspective;
* the revelation of feelings and personal truths (with hints of more to come)
* evocation of a specific time and place in the past which will be the main focus of the book (her childhood and school years which had a formative impact on her);
* use of literary-rhetorical techniques to make the subject "come alive" (e.g. sensory imagery, artful parallelisms, hyperbole, caesura, onomatopoeia - and plenty of drama and black humour!) similar to literary fiction.


This next excerpt is from Cider with Rosie, by Laurie Lee

That was the day we came to the village, in the summer of the last year of the First World War. To a cottage that stood in a half-acre of garden on a steep bank above a lake; a cottage with three floors and a cellar and a treasure in the walls, with a pump and apple trees, syringa and strawberries, rooks in the chimneys, frogs in the cellar, mushrooms on the ceiling, and all for three and sixpence a week.

I don’t know where I lived before then. My life began on the carrier’s cart which brought me up the long slow hills to the village, and dumped me in the high grass, and lost me. I had ridden wrapped up in a Union Jack to protect me from the sun, and when I rolled out of it, and stood piping loud among the buzzing jungle of that summer bank, then, I feel, was I born. And to all the rest of us, the whole family of eight, it was the beginning of a life.

But on that first day we were all lost. Chaos was come in cartloads of furniture, and I crawled the kitchen floor through forests of upturned chair-legs and crystal fields of glass. We were washed up in a new land, and began to spread out searching its springs and treasures. The sisters spent the light of that first day stripping the fruit bushes in the garden. The currants were at their prime, clusters of red, black, and yellow berries all tangled up with wild roses. Here was bounty the girls had never known before, and they darted squawking from bush to bush, clawing the fruit like sparrows.

Comment: Here again the perspective is that of a child. The narrating voice, though, is that of an adult. Note the retrospective stance (achieved through the narrative style, and the more obvious cues That was the day we came to the village; My life began...; first day). Feelings and impressions dominate. Lee is writing about his earliest encounter with his new home -- a house in a village in the Cotswolds at the turn of the century. We will understand the full significance of the village on his life after reading the whole book; but already, in these early pages, we sense that this place holds much in store for the young family, as the children excitedly explore their surroundings. An otherwise mundane move turns into high adventure and literary magic: we are transported along with the children into a wonderful whole new world of possibilities and promises. There are invocations of the exotic and marvellous (washed up in a new land; treasure; buzzing jungle), an abundance of sensory imagery (buzzing; high grass; clawing; clusters of red, black, blue), evocative comparisons (at one point the girls are transformed into hungry birds --metaphor). This is an important moment ("...it was the beginning of a life"; "then, I feel, was I born") and the rest of the book confirms this early impression. The village leaves an indelible mark on the author's life.

These are some of the elements that will important to your attempt at reproducing this this genre for your WT1.


Find more discussions and resources

Guardian
Masters Review
Powerpoint 
Memoir - a snapshot in time
slideshare
slideshare characteristics of memoir
characteristics of 1
pdf
writers write


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