Throwing toys out of the pram
In the past I have made passing references to scribbling my memoirs.
It’s an on-off affair where I go for weeks ignoring it and then land into a day of furious typing where I’ll lash out a couple of thousand words.
Now one thing I discovered about this exercise is that a certain amount of discretion and caution is required. There are some things I don’t write about as they are frankly boring [or maybe more boring than the stuff I am including]. Some items are irrelevant and some items are just plain disrespectful to others if put on paper. Lastly there are some subjects that are private and none of anyone’s business: little nuggets that I shall happily take to the grave.
For example, there are some things I could say about particular members of my family but what is the point? Those members are dead so I’m just tarnishing their memory just so I can somehow make some selfish point or other. Who the hell wants to know where I lost my virginity? Does anyone care? Is it important? Why would I write about fights with my brother? Again that is a trivial topic that is best forgotten because it is mundane and totally irrelevant, unless of course I wish to demonise my brother which is grossly immature and pointless.
Do I wish for fame and glory? No, I don’t. Just so long as my family remembers me then that’s fine. To claim I want a quiet life in obscurity and then not only write a book full of tacky “secrets”, get involved in a mini-series on television where I whinge and moan about my lack of privacy and do endless interviews can only mean one thing.
I need to speak to someone urgently.
Someone private who is qualified in psychiatry.
why do I get the feeling you’re not talking about yourself here?
I don’t know where you got that idea? Maybe if I mentioned the family distrust of my choice of spouse? She is after all someone of “dubious ethnicity” [i.e. She’s from Galway which is pure Culchie].
I’m sure the world needs to know if and on what appendage you got frostbite – or maybe best not?
That’s one of the secrets that goes to my grave.
Write your memoirs.
Stick the tome in a cupboard for five or ten years and then read it.
If you laugh it might be worth publishing.
If you cringe, put it back in the cupboard.
But do write them. Even if just for your descendants.
That is an excellent suggestion. It’s cheering to see someone is confident that I have at least ten years to go? One way or another, what I have written to date should be enough to gave a taste of life in the last century…
Writing your memoirs for the family is good. You get to put your version out there to serve as the basis for endless arguments.
Some errant prince came to a sticky (red hot poker) end in the past. It would be a shame to deny us the never-ending amusement of Schadenfreude, but, hey, insult your future King and expect such treatment.
Would it make it more interesting if you and your brother had a different father? Or your uncle had a penchant for teenage girls?
It would help if I had a totally dysfunctional family of inbreds?
I could/should put something down about my family. Case in point, my Grandad was a cavalryman in the 1st World War, eventually died of shrapnel wounds from WW1 in 1954 and his sword hung in the lobby until the 70s. Sometime in the 60s an Uncle was punched and knocked out by a customer at the bar across the road, so my Granny came into the pub, with thw sword and stabbed the guy that knocked out my uncle. Somehow the police let her off !
That alone is enough for a biography? I have seen many biographies written around far less.