{"id":273,"date":"2010-04-15T13:24:48","date_gmt":"2010-04-15T20:24:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/julijasukys.com\/?p=273"},"modified":"2010-04-15T13:27:52","modified_gmt":"2010-04-15T20:27:52","slug":"what-is-life-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/julijasukys.com\/?p=273","title":{"rendered":"What is life-writing?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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“How many times has someone said that writings of a particular woman had no value because they were merely about daily events?<\/em>” — Elizabeth Hampsten, Read This Only to Yourself.<\/em><\/p>\n

The term “life-writing” designates private texts not written for publication,\u00a0 primarily letters and diaries.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0 moving, intimate and compelling experience.<\/p>\n

I wrote my first book, Silence is Death: The Life and Work of Tahar Djaout<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u0160imait\u0117, 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.<\/p>\n

For years \u0160imait\u0117\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

It is both mundane and sophisticated. Flat and poetic. Tedious and enlightening. Just as the woman herself. Just as life itself.<\/p>\n

[Photo: Paul Worthington]<\/p>\n

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