Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?: A Guest Post by Geoff Dyer

A big-hearted story of adolescence and coming-of-age in post-war Britain. Read on for an exclusive essay from Geoff Dyer on what made him decide to write his memoir and what it was like to look back on his life in Homework.

In 1973 B S Johnson posed a rhetorical question in the form of one of the great book titles of the post-war era: Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? In my case, emphatically not. I’ll be sixty-seven when Homework is published, did most of the writing in my mid-sixties, and started seriously contemplating the idea after I turned sixty.

Before then, when my mother died in 2011, I’d agreed to write something about her illness and death for Granta magazine. I’d had the instinctive discipline to take notes during this protracted period but couldn’t face the extra psychological focus needed to turn notes into a coherent piece of writing. So, not for the first time, I reneged on a commission. My dad died later that same year which added to my desire to write something about my childhood. Not because their dying freed me to write things that might have upset them. I am in the privileged position of coming from a non-reading, non-book-owning family and so had never felt the intimidating pressure of a parent looking over my shoulder as I wrote about drugs or sex or whatever. No, I just couldn’t bear to linger on that intense year of parental death, so I waited, wrote a number of other books, and then began writing a book about them and me (there were no brothers or sisters), the two houses where we lived, my two schools, our relatives and my friends.

There was not anything particularly interesting about me or my story; it’s not like I was the author of Simone Biles: My Early Life. The interest in my rather uneventful story would lie in the way that it exemplified a larger process of social and historical change in Britain: how, thanks to what in Britain we call the post-war settlement, it was possible for the child of working-class parents (my mum was a dinner lady at the canteen of the local school; my dad was a sheet-metal worker) to ride an educational escalator that took him to Oxford. Now, that is an interesting story: a celebration of a system of free education – and health care — funded by taxes. It would also, inevitably, be a story about the experience of class. The paradox, of course, is that the only way of telling this story effectively was by being as faithful as possible to the peculiarities and contingencies of my own experience, to realize and substantiate scenes with the kind of detail that writers of fiction deploy to bring invented worlds to life. The obsessive self-absorption which is the birthright of an only child facilitated the creation of a larger social history.

I was helped in this regard by something which does merit a “Yes” in answer to Johnson’s titular question. After I became interested in reading and, by extension, writing, I wrote some things which were about the only experience I had: childhood and adolescence. These pieces, written at the ages of 17 or 18, were of no literary quality at all but fortunately I kept them and, on re-reading, discovered that they formed a huge reservoir of detail. With their help what Nabokov called “the neutral smudge” of memory could be coaxed — Nabokov’s verb is “forced” — “into beautiful focus.” These details had the additional benefit of narrative consequence; they served as a kind of leg-up in that scenes I had not written about as a teenager had to acquire a corresponding level of perceptual intensity. The textual thread-count was thereby raised throughout.

A short final section of the book, about my parents’ dying, goes back to that failed Granta commission but the main body of the book ends at the age of eighteen, when I get a place at Oxford. I asked my publishers in the US and the UK if instead of “A Memoir” the book might better be sub-titled “A Prelude”, after Wordsworth’s autobiographical account examining the “Growth of a Poet’s Mind.” They thought this was a bad idea and maybe they’re right, maybe it was. Either way this particular prelude ends here and so does the autobiography. There won’t be further installments.

Homework is published by FSG