How I Discovered I’m a Life Writer
Image: Ignat Kushnarev, Unsplash
When Juliette Morton, co-director of Dialect, asked if I’d consider teaching life writing, my immediate thought was that she’d asked the wrong person. I’d taught memoir and creative nonfiction before, but it wasn’t where I felt most at home. I was a poet; prose wasn’t really my area.
Still, I loved the idea of bringing together people with rich, varied lives and helping them find ways of shaping those experiences into writing, so I said yes. I gathered together books I admired—or had been meaning to read for years—by writers such as Maggie O’Farrell, Maggie Nelson, Olivia Laing, Ocean Vuong, Melissa Febos and Mary Karr, and started building a course.
At first I felt like a bit of a fraud. Then, gradually, I realised that life writing wasn’t something I was preparing to teach; it was something I’d been writing for decades.
From teenage diaries to long letters to friends; from notebooks full of observations to the essays I’ve been writing here on Substack; from the prose passages in my book Pretenders to poems rooted in memory and documentary research—I had almost always returned to lived experience as my starting point. I just hadn’t thought of myself as a life writer.
In fact, I’d spent quite a bit of time trying not to be one. As my poetry developed in my late twenties and early thirties, I often used masks and personae in my work. Later, convinced I should stretch myself, I embarked on what was probably a foolhardy attempt to write a radio play. I invented a near-future, climate-changed world and populated it with fictional characters. I thought I was moving away from autobiography and ‘the personal’. But the play was, in fact, an elaborate container for my anxieties about becoming a parent. The more fictional scaffolding I built, the more baldly my own concerns and preoccupations shone through.
