You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Memoir’ tag.
Ava Gardner collage I had some fun making for Bron’s 17th Birthday. Bless photoshop.
So. Here’s an excerpt from a blog I wrote a month ago but decided not to post:
“Only two more semester now. Approximately 30 more hours of sitting, self-loathing, in tute’s full of wankers telling me exactly how not to write like a cliche, until everyone is writing in the same unique way.
When will the end come? Months of finding myself in Readings or Borders, compelled every time to march straight to the new journals and anthologies, opening them to the contents page in order to scan it for names that I recognise. Yes, I know that name. Had a tute with him last semester. She was at that seminar last month. That guy won that competition recently.
Then it’s over to the classics stand, eyes scrutinizing the spines with their famous names. Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Flaubert, Forster. Time to inject myself with some more 20th century fiction. Stuff myself with it till I’m suffocating with words, sentences, clauses, possessive nouns, cliches and idioms.
I write less and less. I sit down once a week at the most, with laptop or pen and paper. It makes no difference; the weight of the entire literary world bears down on my shoulders, heavier and heavier each time. Instinctively, the pen freezes. The words are wrong. They are all wrong. I haven’t used enough of the five senses. My adjectives are overdone, the sentiments that should be there haven’t come out right. I am not clear, not precise. I didn’t put the reader there. They were not with me. They were not there. That metaphor was over used, that entire sentence over worked. Fuck. I say it silently under my breath several times. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”
So. Self-indulgent, yes. But my little *creative writing crisis* reached it’s frenzied summit about a month ago, when I realised that I had actually started to hate the one thing that I’ve always loved. Nothing about it was fun anymore. It was all academic. All about failure, criticism, insecurity, bogus academia, prestige (or lack of it), some ridiculous idea of what it means to be “a writer”.
Worst of all I couldn’t tell whether it was outside forces (Melbourne Uni, Creative Writing tutorials etc) that were doing this to me, or whether in fact I was doing it to myself. Putting myself in this world, this literary, academic world has truly taken all the joy out of writing for me.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Melbourne Uni. Subjects like Sex and Gender have fundamentally changed the way I see the world. Today I walked home contemplating the ideas that I had this time four or five years ago, thinking about the person I was then, and I found that I couldn’t recognize myself. I pitied that person, that person trapped in a confining belief system that was destroying them. By some kind of grace I’ve been allowed to go to Uni and do a degree that has literally opened me up from the inside out. Why let anything destroy that?
I know that I can write. I can write fiction when I want to, but I can also write damn good essays. I can think critically and put those thoughts down on paper with clarity. Feeling unworthy because I throw a few too many adjectives in now and then is ludicrous.
When I was fourteen or fifteen my brother and I spent our school holidays making up stories together. One he started he called the “Island Series” was about a community of families that lived on this little imaginary farming island. We drew maps and pictures of all the characters and the way that they all related to each-other (cousins, best friends, lovers, etc). Then we’d each pick a character and start writing from their perspective. We’d make up plots and each take on the parts of different characters. We planned for these things to be novels, and I think they often got to about ten or fifteen thousand words or so before we got tired of them and started something else.
Writing those stories was one of my absolute favorite things to do on winter school holidays. Getting lost in an imaginary world which I could create and explore through writing had to be about the greatest way I could think to spend my time. From primary school til late high school writing these long, novel-esque narratives about familys and relationships and adventures was all I did.
At uni that all went away. Instead of writing more, I wrote less. Each semester I’ve painstakingly churned out 3,000 words for assessment, something I wouldn’t have thought twice about as a kid. Sure, perhaps the quality was considerably better. After all, I had to think about language and sentence structure and originality in a way I never had before. At first, although it was hugely challenging, it was invigorating. I learned about different styles of writing, different avenues I could take. But somewhere in the last three years the love of creating things with language fell by the wayside, got lost in the angst of making sure I was writing the “right” way.
One of my saviors in the last few weeks was reading Mr Paul’s self-published book “Trippa”. Sure, it wasn’t perfect. It didn’t always get the grammar right. But it was fun. Clever, honest, page-turning. It reminded me of how much fun writing is. It was enough to make me realise that there’s a fundamental joy in writing that I want back. Like, if I could somehow shed this infected skin of academia and all the insecurities that have slowly grown all over it, if I could get back to that pure, raw excitement and love of writing I had when Chris and I wrote the Island stories, then something great could happen. I could do this, for real. Take the stuff I’ve learned and mix it in with the fun. Leave all the other stuff behind.
I’ve decided that I won’t be doing honours next year. And in all likelihood it won’t be in creative writing if I ever do. For now, all that pressure has to go. I’m not going to worry about publishing, about any of that shit. But over the semester break I’m going to spend some rainy days drawing up character profiles and dreaming up fantastical plots. And maybe then the words will start coming back.
Regina Spektor’s new album is coming out in six days – yep, that’s right, six days! I’m not sure if it’ll be in Australia then too, but I hope so! Otherwise a download will have to suffice until I can get my hands on the real thing.
I love introducing people to Regina when I get the chance. The first time I heard her was at Emily’s place and I remember being struck by how beautiful and unusual her voice was. In first year I wrote a ‘music memoir’ piece for creative writing. Even though I don’t really like it, I’ll paste a paragraph or two in since it explains my Regina obsession:
” The Consequence of Sounds.
October, 2006.
Six weeks of high school left, and my favourite time of day is the walk home from the bus stop. Juliet, my thirteen year old sister and I, share the earphones of my ipod between us and dawdle on our way; stopping to get hot chips at the milk bar, skirting around the footy oval and weaving our way through the naked trees by the tennis courts. We are listening to Regina Spektor’s Soviet Kitsch album. On it’s cover, Regina is surrounded by Russian Babushka dolls, swigging from a bottle of vodka and looking mischeviously back at the camera. She is Russian/American, growing up in Moscow and now living in New York. Her lyrics are a minefield of pop-culture and literature references; she sings about everything from Hemingway to Oedipus to Samson and Delilah. Her songs are thoughtful and intelligent, and she is the first artist introducted to my insular musical world that makes me want to scream ‘oh my God, this is music!’ everytime I listen to her. I am an immediate convert only seconds after hearing her mix of classical piano and ecclectic punk at a friends place. Unexpectedly, Juliet my jumps on my bandwagon. When we get home, we grab out the bongo drums, instil ourselves in the lounge room by the piano and begin rapping out to one of Regina’s crazy songs, ‘Pavlov’s Daughter’ or ‘Consequence of sounds‘.
March, 2007.
I am at university and fast becoming, in the words of Regina an ‘incurable humanist’. I feel liberated from the suffocating environment of my small Christian high school. Although i had a great group of friends there, I always felt like a square peg in a round hole. At uni, everyone is different -there is no ‘right’ way to be. I no longer feel that I have to fit into a mould. I am starting to think for myself, really think, for the first time. I can behave how I want, wear what I want. Uni is a forum for self discovery. I am overwhelmed by the amount of knowledge in the world and how little of it I posess myself. But the prospect of how much there is to learn thrills me. I find myself with a ridiculous grin on my face just by being among people who are, although all so different to me, so like me. I want to jump up and down in my tutes with sheer joy at the discovery that other people think in the same way as me, have the same questions as me, appreciated the same things. I sit there and listen to people describe and bring to life thoughts and feelings that I share. I want to shout ‘Yes! I feel that too!’ It’s like someone has written‘You are not alone!’ across the sky. “
In retrospect it’s somewhat dramatic, and I think that piece was a lot more about me than the music (probably why I didn’t get the best mark for it). It’s interesting how music becomes the background of life though. Looking back, you can connect a song or artist with a certain part of your life, and all the associated feelings or emotions that were present at that time. My music taste seems to be constantly evolving. There’s some CD’s that I don’t really like to listen to anymore because they remind me of low times in life. But Regina has been one artists who has had a big effect on me in both happy and sad times. I think it comes down to the fact that she embodies the different = beautiful ideal. And I like that alot.
This is the music video for Laughing With.
There’s nothing quite like the satisfying feeling of cleaning out a wardrobe, cabinet or bookshelf. After purging your life of extraneous and unwanted clutter some sort of internal cleansing seems to have taken place, only what really matters is left and you have extra space to revel in before you inevitably fill it with more clutter. What’s even better though is watching a friend or relative rid themselves of unwanted goods and being first in line to pick through the op-shop pile. Yes, this has happened to me a number of times, the most fulfilling usually occurs when Katie attempts to rid her overflowing clothes drawers of some excellent ‘last-season’ goodies. But actually what I inherited from my sister’s bookshelf last week was two poetry volumes ‘The collected poems of Emily Dickinson’ and ‘Sylvia Plath: Collected Poems’; remnants from year twelve literature.
’Do I really want to keep these?’ Annie asked. Then, answering her own question ‘No. Emily Dickinson was a psychopathic maniac. When am I ever going to read her poems again?’
‘I’ll take them!’ I immediately volunteered. ‘I’m partial to the psychopathic maniac female writer.’
‘Really?’ She looked surprised as I snatched them greedily. It was my first open confession of a growing morbid fascination; I had already written a research paper on Virginia Woolf and just last week finished Sylvia Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar. 
People sometimes describe a great novel using words like ‘gripping’ or ‘thrilling’, an experience where words ‘jump off the page’. I have to concur with some of these clichés; there were sentences in The Bell Jar that did stand out in bold for their blunt, unashamed honesty. And what struck me was reading a chapter and feeling as though the words in print were exactly what would have poured out of my own mouth at some points in my life had I had the ability to articulate them. Especially the parts about sex: ‘when i was nineteen, pureness was a great issue. Instead of the world being divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and black men or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn’t, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another. I thought a spectacular change would come over me the day I crossed the boundary line. I thought it would be the way I’d feel if I ever visited Europe.’
The Bell Jar is an internal monologue of a year in the life of Esther Greenwood; an intelligent scholarship student who goes from a promising honours candidate to a suicidal patient in a mental institution receiving shock treatments to try and cure her depression. Throughout the second half of the book, Esther contemplates and makes various attempts at suicide by drowning, hanging, cutting her wrists, jumping from a bridge and so on; ‘I could see that my body had all sorts of little tricks, such as making my hands go limp at the crucial second, which would save it, time and again, whereas if I had the whole say, I would be dead in a flash. I would simply have to ambush it with whatever sense I had left, or it would trap me in its stupid cage without any sense at all.’ Esther doesn’t succeed in her mission during the course of the novel; the last page sees her stepping into the office of her rehab clinic where a panel of doctors will determine whether she is well enough to go back to college. What is most chilling about The Bell Jar though is that Sylvia Plath’s own suicide followed only a month after the first publication, printed under the pseudonym of Victoria Lucas. The book is thus branded a roman a clef, a partial autobiography, making the thoughts of Esther Greenwood frighteningly real, a mirror of it’s authors own experience. More horrifying still though is a memoir written by one of Plath’s first publishers, which convincingly claims that Sylvia Plath never intended to kill herself but rather ‘to be found and saved’ and she died ‘only because of a freakish series of accidents’. :O
I wonder if my interest in suicidal manic-depressive feminist writers should alarm me a little. Nah. I could hazard a guess that in the last forty years millions of literature essays, poetry analysis and feminist papers have been submitted on the life and work of Sylvia Plath.
Now I have to admit that I have done little more than flick though the collected works of poetry yet; but they are safe and sound in my almost entirely narrative-based bookshelf. Makes me feel just a little bit smarter having them there in between Maggie Alderson and Meg Cabot.
Recent Comments