Which of these statements are true?
- Within a fortnight of moving to the island, I was, from a brief time, Tenerife’s ambassador to Ireland.
- The relative of a world-famous singer tried to bribe me.
- When I returned from a toilet visit in a restaurant in Mumbai, my table, and Andy with it, had disappeared.
- I accompanied a gorilla into the Houses of Parliament.
- One dark and stormy night, in a Victorian hotel which was closed for the winter, I witnessed someone being possessed.
- I once wrote a speech for a British Prime Minister.
- Sri Lankan soldiers held their rifles over me while I picked a padlock with a paper clip.
- A spy gave me a mini camera and warned me never to get its film developed.
- At midnight on a certain day every year, Andy and I would strip off to take part in a magic ritual.
- Participating in a riot, I lobbed bricks at a line of soldiers crouched behind riot shields.
The answer is all of them. They all happened. Some possibly not in the way someone reading them might visualise, others are exactly as they sound.
Following the furore over The Salt Path, some in the media and on the socials have gone a tad hysterical. I suspect this is mostly riding a wave. Mention of The Salt Path brings in readers. That’s the way the media (alt or mainstream) works.
Aha! You cry. You’re equally guilty. You’ve written about The Salt Path, and here you are, once again making a reference to it.
True, but here’s the thing. My Salt Path post was published weeks before The Observer article. And this one isn’t about the book or controversy surrounding it, it concerns some of nonsensical backlash about not being able to trust memoirs. Both Andy and I have written memoirs, so, as the tagline for the worst Jaws movie goes, this time it’s personal.
What is a memoir?
“A memoir is a nonfiction narrative writing based on the author’s personal memories.”
Based on personal memories, tugs at chin, hmm. Last week, I walked through our village, meeting two villagers who both told me different versions of the same story. Neither were lying. They just recounted things as they saw them.
This didn’t happen. It’s allegorical. But it occurs all the time. Andy and I often view experiences from slightly different angles, à la Jackie Brown. We are all the main stars of our own movies, so it follows that accounts will differ depending on who’s giving them.
Fact or fiction?
In travel articles, it’s common for writers to give the impression they alone enjoyed some experience when they might have been part of a group of travel writers on a press trip. That doesn’t mean they didn’t have the experience, or what they wrote wasn’t valid, they simply didn’t share certain details about it.
Returning to the first statement at the start of this, about me becoming Tenerife’s ambassador to Ireland, Andy outlined exactly what happened in her book The Banana Road. She was able to do so because we were at the centre of it. The same story was described in another author’s memoir. It captured the essence of what happened, but it wasn’t 100% accurate because the author in that case was a supporting player, so only had some of the facts. Did that matter? I don’t believe so, because the bizarre element was a nobody (me) being mistaken for the guest of honour at a prestigious award ceremony, and that could have had embarrassing consequences for a number of people.
But subjective memories aren’t the same as outright lying. Some writers do make up stories for their memoirs. This is well documented. Andy believes some people think we do. There is some evidence to support this. On a visit to El Hierro in the Canaries, we got caught up in a search for a quintet of escaped piglets, with us finding them in the end. It’s a small story, yet a British immigrant questioned the authenticity because, well, they lived there and nothing like that ever happened to them. What can I say? We walk and walk and walk across destinations, heading deep into remote parts. When you explore places this way, things happen. The person who questioned the story’s veracity didn’t. It ain’t rocket science.
I’m still going to approach reading memoirs in the way I always have, with an open mind. If what an author writes sounds true, I’ll happily go along with it. In the end, everything is subjective.
BTW, I forgot to add to the list my attempts to become immortal in the ghost city of Fengdu – also true.
