ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

This session featured Krissy Kneen (Affection) , Don Walker (Shots), and Catherine Therese (The Weight of Silence).

The focus of the session was: when writing memoirs where do tell-all memoirists draw the line?

Krissy Kneen in her book Affection wrote about her life now,  her childhood and adolescence.  The issue for her was how to write the now when with an aging body she no longer identifies with her wild sexual past from 20 years ago.  She blogs about this past too, and has got permission from some past lovers to do so - but there was an instance of someone who subsequently objected to inclusion and she had to delete all the posts.  There’s a husband to consider, and past lovers and friends…. getting ‘permission’ doesn’t always work when people belatedly discover that they don’t like being revealed to the world online.  The presence of Kneen’s husband in the audience reminded me of Mary Moody and the way she humiliated her loving husband in her book about her extra-marital adventures in Italy.  It all sounds like an emotional minefield to me , and I wondered why would anyone want to do this so much when it’s so risky.

(This issue makes me think of the question I asked of Sophie Cunningham in an earlier session: do wise and thoughtful editors sometimes counsel authors about being too frank and revealing too much about themselves and their families?    There is no wise and thoughtful editor guiding a blogger. )

Catherine Therese has written a memoir about her dysfunctional family.  The Weight of Silence is about the silence she grew up with, a place where everyone talked but not about what was really going on.  What was left out was an explanation to the child about traumatic things that happened.  She said that what is concealed and revealed by a writer contributes to a writer’s style but it also reveals the writer’s mind. In her family with an alcoholic father, the ‘adult child’ learned to disown what had been learned – and it impacted on emotional growth and development. Her book is about giving voice to the child’s experience of living in a world that denies the difficult truth.   There is a place for this kind of memoir, and her reading of excerpts shows that she writes well.  But what will she write about next?

Don Walker was next, and so I have to make a confession.  I did not know who he was.  Not only have I had a complete sporting bypass, I am also wholly ignorant of most aspects of popular culture.  I spent my teenage years listening to Beethoven symphonies and reading the classics.  I haven’t watched commercial TV since I stopped watching Disneyland on Sunday nights, and I don’t even read women’s magazines at the hairdresser.   Is he famous? I asked Sally as we came out of the session, because I had somehow got the impression that he was a country and western singer.  It turns out that he was the songwriter for Cold Chisel, a 1970s pop group…   

Anyway, I think that not knowing who he was was a plus for me.  I listened to what he had to say in terms of his reincarnation as a  short story writer.  (Well, maybe not reincarnation.  For all I know, Cold Chisel may still be packing them in at Festival Hall.  (If there still is a Festival Hall? I used to detour past Festival Hall on my way to university, but that was back in 1982.  Oh dear, I’m digressing again.) 

What Don Walker said was that publication of personal  histories  always seemed  a bit risky and he hesitated about revealing all in print. He had moments of panic – even though ultimately there’s apparently not much to be nervous about.  In marked contrast to the tell-all writers on this panel he said that he thought that we always need to ‘tiptoe around’ subjects of adult sexuality and growing up in a family (dysfunctional or otherwise).  He left his children and some important past relationships out of his life story because he felt that they had a right to tell their own story and it’s not fair to include them in his.  Family censorship occurred too – his wife didn’t like some aspects of what he had written and they were excised so that any adult relationship or sexual history in his book is not about the people most important to him.   He was quietly assertive about his and their right to privacy, and was also quite firm about his view that much of what seems fascinating, amusing and unique to us when we are young is often quite banal, more common than we thought and therefore of very little interest to anybody else. 

The interesting thing about this session is, why does Don Walker care about not betraying the family he loved when he wrote about his childhood and Kneen and Therese are more concerned about giving voice to their concerns?  What does this difference of perspective reveal about them?  Which would be more interesting to read?  Would prurience enter into that assessment about what’s interesting?

Blogged live, and tidied up at home…