“How many times has someone said that writings of a particular woman had no value because they were merely about daily events?” — Elizabeth Hampsten, Read This Only to Yourself.
The term “life-writing” designates private texts not written for publication, primarily letters and diaries. It can tell us a lot about the past, how people lived, what they thought, how they organized their time. It can also tell us about the internal lives of people who have traditionally gone unnoticed, especially women. And although we might read much life-writing for content, many of us are interested in life-writing not only as historical artifact, but as literature.
But for all its richness, life-writing poses challenges. Unlike a formal biography or autobiography, it tends have little structure other than chronology, its boring parts aren’t edited out, and obscure references go unexplained. Life-writing records life at as happens. It’s raw and real. Sometimes this isn’t a good thing, but what surprises me more is how often it is.
What continually amazes me about a pile of letters spanning a decade or more is how successfully they tell a story, bit by bit, day by day. Despite the chaos of daily life and lack of artifice, life-writing holds its own. Reading a collection of letters can be a moving, intimate and compelling experience.
I wrote my first book, Silence is Death: The Life and Work of Tahar Djaout, on the basis of a public archive, telling Djaout’s story through the books and articles he left behind after his 1993 death, when he was gunned down through his open car window. I didn’t interview his family members or visit his grave. I didn’t read his letters or diaries. Instead, I built a relationship with him inside my head, and carried my idea of him for several years while I wrote my (his?) book.
But with the next big project, I decided to take up a new challenge: to tell the life story of a woman who did not consider herself a writer, even though she wrote an amazing number of letters and diaries. Ona Šimaitė, the subject of my second manuscript, wrote somewhere between thirty thousand and fifty thousand letters during her adult life. A great number of these survived, and they served as my primary source.
For years Šimaitė’s writings perplexed me. Pages and pages of diaries, manuscripts and notes. Heroic deeds, travels, tragedy, hardship, poverty, revolution, shopping, cats, visa applications, debts, books, weather: these are the themes that circulate through her writing.
It is both mundane and sophisticated. Flat and poetic. Tedious and enlightening. Just as the woman herself. Just as life itself.
[Photo: Paul Worthington]
I strongly urge you to read “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society”. The book is a work of fiction and it’s light and fluffy but it very successfully tells a story about women through semi-private life writing (letters and telegrams).
I kept a diary, intermittently, from ages 18 to 31. I think that I discontinued it because I started practicing yoga very intensely and in so doing, finally managed to find mental peace (the absence of which had been pushing me to journal).
Recently, in response to news about someone I used to know, I read back over these diaries. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. I’m not even sure what lead me to do it; I just felt like I should. The experience was incredibly rich: grounding and eye-opening. We live with ourselves day in and day out, which makes it hard to appreciate the progress we make but reading over what I had written years earlier reassured me that yes, I am in fact getting somewhere.