Posts tagged 'memoir'

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Emma Forrest’s career as a writer almost predates her adolescence. She’s toured with pop bands, written a column in the Times, published several books including three novels, and dated stars of stage and screen. She’s also struggled with debilitating mental illness. This is how she described her descent into madness in a 2008 Guardian article advising sympathy for Britney Spears:

“I was 22 in 2000, living in New York on contract to this newspaper and about to have my first book hit the shelves … Beginning as writer’s block, [the psychosis] evolved into a profound self-loathing made visible around my studio apartment by a knee-deep mess of newspapers, magazines, books, clothes … It starts to be a psychotic break when one moves from depression to being afraid of opening the refrigerator because the monster that yells, ‘Zool!’ at Sigourney Weaver in Ghostbusters might be there. But I didn’t see how crazy that was … By the end of 2000, I was self mutilating a few times a week and having four scaldingly hot baths a day, trying to feel something and trying to make the hours pass, like Britney, driving in circles, padding out her days.”

After a serious suicide attempt, Forrest ended up in hospital, where her illness stabilised. Her path back to wellness began following her return to New York, when she began seeing her psychiatrist, whom she refers to as Dr R. In her memoir of the time, Your Voice in My Head, Dr R looms as a large, beneficent presence. In her words, he helped Forrest “fall out of love with madness”. In her memoir, Forrest writes about Dr R’s unexpected death, and having to learn to be happy on her own. Nowadays, Forrest is a screenwriter based in Los Angeles.

Here’s Emma Forrest on Radio National’s Book Show, and here’s a review of Your Voice in My Head in the Guardian and another in The Awl.

In a New York Times article titled ‘The Problem with Memoir’, Neil Genzlinger revisits the genre in his review of 4 new memoirs, including Johanna Adorjan’s An Exclusive Love.

Genzlinger outlines 4 rules of thumb for would-be memoirists: (1) “That you had parents and a childhood does not of itself qualify you to write a memoir.” (2) “No one wants to relive your misery.” (3) “If you’re jumping on a bandwagon, make sure you have better credentials than the people already on it.” (4) “If you still must write a memoir, consider making yourself the least important character in it.”

The article has prompted replies from McNally Jackson and this from Scribner: “For every three mediocre memoirs Genzlinger could pull off the shelves, there are three brilliant, moving, and transcendent works he could have found, too.”

Memoirists of note appearing soon at the Wheeler Centre include Benjamin Law, John Wood, Michael McGirr, Kate Holden and Raimond Gaita.

What do you think? Post a comment below and join the conversation.

Meet Sebastian. He doesn’t talk much. In fact he hasn’t spoken since we met. The strong silent type, Sebastian has a round head and lean flanks. He hails from Sweden, along with Gilbert, who lives in my dining room.

We also have an L-shaped couch called Karlstad and a blond coffee table named Ramvik. To complete the family there is Benno the bookcase, a desk named Galant and nest of shelves in the garden shed called Gorm.

I don’t speak Swedish. Apart from the words our language has pinched – like ombudsman and smorgasbord – I’m mute as Sebastian. Yet all this time, living among the IKEA colony we call a home, I’d presumed Ramvik was a word meaning modular couch with puffy armrests in Stockholm.

And Florö was Swedish for a queen-size bedframe made of particle board and steel rods. Turns out Floro is really a herring town in western Norway, just like Trondheim, the sister bed in the catalogue, is a seat of learning five hours north of Oslo.

There’s a system lurking behind these IKEA names, though the logic is harder to grasp than a clammy Allen key. Benno and Gorm, say, are both Swedish boys, as is Gilbert the chair and Sebastian the adjustable stool. Meanwhile Lusy Bloom (a cushion) and Alvine Snurr (a throw rug) are two Nordic lasses.

Lakes and rivers (like Apskar and Toftbo) belong in the bathroom, being a wash basin and cotton mat respectively. Swedish islands occupy the patio as furniture. While Finnish towns are interior tables, and Danish ones, carpet.

Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, created this quirky naming system to offset his own dyslexia, goes the popular theory. Far better to link a low table to Ramvik, a small dairy town on the Baltic, rather than dabble in the typical coding claptrap of CQ41-209TX, which happens to be a laptop at Harvey Norman.

Nouns and adjectives also rate as chattels in the IKEA catalogue. Doll-house items are listed under Duktig, which means well-behaved. While Luftig, an exhaust fan, translates as airy. Mind you, the tactic can backfire when some names are exported.

Already in Australia we changed the Jerker work station into a seemlier Fredrik, just as Berliners balked at buying a double bunk for kids called Gutvik, since it meant good bonk in German, not bunk. And what odds do you give Lyckhem, an occasional table meaning bliss, on surviving innuendo?

But soon enough we’ll all be yapping makeshift Swedish. As IKEA flotsam populates our homes, we won’t blink twice to hear our host remark, ‘Hey Trish, why not grab that extra Gilbert near the Expedit and slide it under the Helsinki.’

David Astle is a cruciverbalist and author of Puzzled: Secrets And Clues From A Life Lost In Words.

The US military is red-faced over a Pentagon campaign to buy up a controversial memoir about operations in Afghanistan, according to Aol News.

Retired Lt Colonel Anthony Shaffer wrote the catchily titled Operation Dark Heart: Spycraft and Special Ops on the Frontlines of Afghanistan – and the Path to Victory based on his service in Afghanistan. He never expected it to be an instant bestseller with the Pentagon purchasing the entire print run of 10,000 books.

While the book was submitted to be cleared by the Department of Defense, the book seemed have gotten lost within the system and now the Pentagon is buying back. Shaffer famously spoke out about how the government ignored pre-September 11 warnings of extremist activity, so the Operation Dark Heart’s content promises to be explosive. But with review copies and advances already released several copies of the book are already seeing the light of day. The Huffington Post reports a copy on eBay going for just over US$2,000.

Shaffer’s attorney, Mark Zaid, sees the Pentagon’s actions as huge publicity for a book that would have been largely ignored. Zaid said without the pulping, “fewer people would have read the book, and most of those people would have been inside the government, or people who already knew this stuff. Now, the government has highlighted that there’s something in this book that everyone wants to see.”

Ian Brown wrote about his son’s struggle with an orphan syndrome for Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper, but also included some emotional video footage of his son Walker watching him play guitar and trying to understand the world.

Brown struggles to create routine for his son in the chaos of what he describes as “cardio-facio-cutaneous syndrome, a technical name for a mash of symptoms”. The routine helps to keeps Walker relaxed but it is also the routine that “makes the eight years [of caring for Walker] seem longer, until afterward, when because of the routine the years seem to have evaporated.”

It’s a story told with great honesty as Brown and his wife struggle to keep their son at home rather than surrendering to care and try to find other parents coping with children with similar syndromes. Most of all, Brown’s isolation was compounded by the lack of people to empathise with. “There wasn’t even anyone to compare him to. His illness… afflicted about 100 people. But they were scattered at random in Australia, Denmark, Britain, Japan, the United States.”

The Observer publishes an extract from Patti Smith's new memoir, Just Kids.

Patti Smith's Just Kids: Harper Collins