A Memoir and Writing Family Love: Autobiographical Novel to Memoir, an Exegesis

FAMILY LOVE: A MEMOIR AND WRITING FAMILY LOVE: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL TO MEMOIR, AN EXEGESIS JUDY ROSEMARY SCOTT (ka Rosie) A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for The degree of Doctor of Creative Arts In College of Arts School of Humanities and Languages UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN SYDNEY AUSTRALIA (2006) ABSTRACT When I first started thinking about writing Family Love I wanted to write it as an autobiographical novel. This meant a radical departure from my usual writing methods. For one thing, it was the first time in my writing life that I was interested in the conscious use of a period in my life as material for a novel. I had never before attempted this and felt a certain amount of apprehension in abandoning tried and true approaches for something so new and risky. The label, autobiographical novel, seemed to define most accurately for the purposes and process of the thesis what were in fact a series of decisions, vacillations and rationalisations. An autobiographical novel seemed the best form for what I wanted from Family Love, a book that combined the fictional momentum and surprises of a novel with the added depth of personal and political material consciously drawn from real life and living people. I believed that the detailed evocation of a specific time and place my childhood and early adolescence in Sandringham and Titirangi in New Zealand, aided by diaries and memory would allow the story to follow its own fictional bent, and to have the emotionally truthful resonance of fiction without necessarily being completely factual. Writing Family Love: Autobiographical novel to memoir 1 Introduction............................................................................................................2 2 Definition of an Autobiographical novel ................................................................12 3 The ‘Commentary’ ................................................................................................18 4. The Narrator..........................................................................................................25 5 Problems ...............................................................................................................29 6 The First Draft.......................................................................................................35 7 Fictional Memoir ...................................................................................................43 8 Problems (Part 2)...................................................................................................47 9 ‘Autobiographical novel to fictional memoir’ ........................................................51 10 Analysis of process in Chapter 13 ......................................................................55 11 Three Memoirs ..................................................................................................61 12 Writing in an Academic Context for the first time..............................................70 13 Discoveries........................................................................................................77 14 In Summary. ......................................................................................................79 Bibliography .................................................................................................................83 1 Introduction When I first started thinking about writing Family Love I wanted to write it as an autobiographical novel. This meant a radical departure from my usual writing methods. For one thing, it was the first time in my writing life that I was interested in the conscious use of a period in my life as material for a novel. I had never before attempted this and felt a certain amount of apprehension in abandoning tried and true approaches for something so new and risky. Until then Fellini’s comment that ‘everything and nothing in my work is autobiographical’1 was the best way to describe how my fiction and life meshed. Obviously there is an autobiographical basis to all my work but it expresses itself not in facts or events so much as oblique flashes, subconscious truths that arise out of the process of writing. In the creation of fictional characters in my novels, for example, I had never before set out to write about a particular person in the naturalistic sense. I have not been interested in telling someone’s story so much as becoming involved in the process of discovering and developing characters constructed from many sources including my own 2 fantasies. These characters often emerge from the story itself and in turn drive it. An analysis of the characters in my novels reveals the similarity of their genesis; a complex process of observation, immersion and discovery. Such characters can be divided roughly into three categories: those that are almost purely works of imagination, created from thin air as it were, with no resemblance to living people, (for example, Glory Day or Violet Singer); those that are an amalgam of people I know, (for example Roxy or Faith Singer) and thirdly, a very small number (probably no more than half a dozen) that are portraits of living people. None of these characters in any of the categories were consciously drawn from real life, in that I didn’t deliberately set out to write about them, and only found this was happening during the course of the novel. Of the second category, for instance, Faith Singer was not taken from real life so much as recast. The inspiration for her came from many disparate sources, including elements of the fearlessness and natural unconventionality I admired in Dorothy Hewett, and women rock singers with their distinctive style. A critic once described me as a method actor in the way I went about writing fiction, and, in particular, finding the voice of a character. This is an observation I find useful because there is something almost ‘actorly’ about my immersion into fictional characters’ lives. It is a complete identification which results in what could be loosely described as super realism. I am writing from life but from my own intensely observed construction of a life — a construction which has its own rules, logic and momentum and often bears little resemblance to the ‘facts’ or the real people. 3 This process of immersion and total identification with a fictional work is most memorably analysed by Janet Frame in her autobiographical trilogy Angel at my Table. In Envoy from Mirror City, she wrote, ‘If I make that hazardous journey to the Mirror City where everything I have known or dreamed is bathed in the light of another world, what use is there in returning only with a mirrorful of me…the self must be the container of the treasures of Mirror City, the envoy as it were, and when the time comes to arrange and list these treasures for shaping into words, the self must be the worker, the bearer of the burden, the chooser, placer and polisher…these are the processes of fiction. “Putting it all down as it happens” is not fiction, there must be the journey by oneself, the light focussed upon the material, the willingness of the author herself to live within that light, the city of reflections governed by different laws, materials, currency. Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to a real place; it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination, learning the unique functioning of Mirror City, its skies and spaces, its own planetary system.’2 Even my own fictional characters belonging in the third category — those that are direct portraits of living people — are not arrived at by conscious intention. This can be illustrated most clearly by the fact that it is generally only towards the end of the novel that I recognise where they come from and who they are. It is as if I am unconsciously drawing upon my knowledge of the person to create a portrayal of them. Two examples of this strange process of discovery are ‘Sam’ in Glory Days3 who turned out to be a caretaker and cleaner at a clinic I once worked in as a counsellor, and ‘George the Horse’ in Lives on Fire4, who ran a camping ground, Early Storms, outside Injune in Western Queensland, where we stayed once. 4 The closest analogy I can find to this process of discovery in writing fiction is that flash of recognition you have when you have just woken from a dream. It is a recognition of the emotional meaning of the dream and often, too, of the real identity of the people in it. In the clear light of morning, the mysterious events you have been so intensely experiencing in your dream, the strange behaviour of the people you met there suddenly make sense; you recognise their relationship to you and the particular meaning they have in your life and thought. A striking example of this in my own writing experience was the genesis of Angel, one of the main characters in Faith Singer.5 I had seen a young girl working the streets of Kings Cross once or twice – she was a very young, dreamy-looking girl wearing elegant 40’s clothes; she had an innocent, otherworldly air about her. I had a strong emotional reaction to what I sensed was her quality of thoughtful vulnerability. This was so strong that I even had the impulse to go up and talk to her, invite her to come and stay with me, and so, somehow, get her off the streets. I only glimpsed her twice or three times at the most, and had no conscious knowledge of how much she had really affected me. A year later I saw her face again — on the front

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