Memoir

Edmund White grew up in a world where sex, and gay sex in particular, was an unspoken reality. In 1950s Cincinnati, ‘no one “came out” except drag queens and the campy peroxided waiter at the diner’, he writes in the first chapter of The Loves of My Life. That blanket of near-silence doesn’t seem to have inhibited him much. He was sexually precocious from the age of 12, as his autobiographical novel A Boy’s Own Story (1982) first suggested. But it may account for the determined frankness with which he has treated sex in both his fiction and memoirs. For an author who came of age in pre-liberation America, erotic candour has always been a political act, at least in part – never merely profligate.

Shortly before Bill Gates’s seventh birthday in 1962, his parents stuffed their son into a button-down shirt and blazer for a visit to Century 21, a bold showcase of scientific prowess in their home town of Seattle. This futuristic fair was intended as the nation’s rebuff to Soviet Russia following the Sputnik satellite launch, which sparked the space race. The family enjoyed the new 600ft Space Needle. They also saw the Mercury capsule that carried the first American into space; Ford’s concept of a six-wheeled nuclear-powered car; and IBM’s idea of a cheap computer, costing $100,000. Best of all in the boy’s view was rattling around on the Wild Mouse Ride, which felt risky and thrilling, stoking a lifelong love of rollercoasters.

Ah, the scents of one’s youth! What hot, sour teenage kisses and grinding youth club discos would be conjured up for me by one whiff of Aqua Manda or the original Charlie. Adelle Stripe has constructed a memoir around 18 key fragrances, one for each chapter of her life, but true perfume addicts may find ‘the juice’ somewhat lacking. It might just be scented scaffolding, but fortunately the story underneath is captivating. Dune, CK One and the rest do not trigger madeleine-like waves of memory for Stripe; neither is this a paean to the olfactory art. The perfumes crop up casually rather than crucially: her dairy farmer father’s ancient bottle of Brut; her hairdresser mother’s Rive Gauche; a friend’s cloying Angel, which ‘fills every corner of the room like tear gas’.

James Birch is a somewhat mysterious art dealer and curator, whose first great triumph was mounting a Francis Bacon exhibition in Moscow in 1988. He wrote a gripping book about that adventure, Bacon in Moscow, and has now written an even more gripping follow-up, about taking Gilbert and George to Moscow, Beijing and Shanghai. Mounting the Moscow exhibition meant getting drunk every night, but Birch carried it off with aplomb Birch was born ‘circa 1956’, according to Wikipedia, and grew up in Primrose Hill, London. Both his parents were artists and also communists, which he claims was not unusual in the 1960s (though I’d say it was, quite).

I was on the phone to a friend recently, who asked me what I was reviewing. ‘It’s a book by a lady intellectual,’ I began. ‘Oh my God,’ she said, ‘I hope you don’t put that in your review.’ ‘I’m not that stupid,’ I replied, ‘but it is very important that she’s a woman.’ A self-described radical feminist in the 1960s and 1970s, Vivian Gornick says that that flame has died down a bit now (she was 79 when this book was first published ten years ago). Her perspective in this meandering, delightful memoir-cum-essay is still, obviously, feminine – yet there is a kind of detachment; and from what she says about her past life, and her experiences with men, and with love, there always was, in a way. Hence the ‘odd’ in the title.

We know of the Durrells mainly through their own writings, outstandingly My Family and Other Animals, about their years in Corfu in the 1930s, and from the image of them created by TV and film adaptations of this work. Gerald and Lawrence were the best known members of the family, the first as a zoologist and conservationist, the second as an experimental writer. Their siblings, Margaret (Margo) and Leslie, will always be perceived through the lens Gerald turned on them in My Family – the former as a flighty eccentric, something like an extra from a Carry On film, the latter as a pantomime villain. Their mother, Louisa, was loved unreservedly by her children and comes across in My Family as a kindly eccentric.

How can you break the mental manacles of an empire that has occupied not only your physical world but also your education, publishing, media, high culture and popular entertainment? In his endearing memoir of Odesa, Undefeatable, Julian Evans quotes the Ukrainian author Viktoria Amelina, who describes growing up in post-Soviet Ukraine surrounded by all things Russian. She attended a Russian school, acted in children’s Russian theatre, listened to Russian rock and prayed in a Russian Orthodox church: ‘There was an entire system in place that aimed to make me believe that Moscow, not Kyiv, was the centre of my universe.’ When she was 15, Amelina felt flattered to be invited to Moscow for a Russian language contest. She was thrilled to be interviewed on state television.

In The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky writes: ‘It would be strange in times like ours to expect to find clarity in anyone.’ Given where the times have got to in the intervening 140 years, one would suspect that clarity would be even further from us. The clarity we seek is generally externalised, about the world and its workings; that which is most hidden is about our personal histories and our families’ intergenerational legacies. Nightshade Mother is the Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis’s quest for clarity – a memoir of excavation positioned between what the infant experienced and what the adult has sought to understand. Multiple narratives are in play: the voice of the child, the poet, the scientist and the psychologist. Lewis is adept at all these stratagems.

Recollections of crimes, misdemeanours and shameful stories can pall, especially when viewed through the bleary-eyed lens of alcohol. But In the Blood, a memoir of devastating clarity – the result of an unprecedented collaboration between a mother and daughter whose alcoholic gene was ‘baked into them like a curse’ – provides a frightening insight into the labyrinthine workings of the addict’s devious mind.  The illness had run riotously through many generations until Julia Hamilton and Arabella Byrne both rejected what had ‘zig-zagged through [their] family like a knight in chess’.

One of my favourite cartoons is of the owl and the pussycat going to sea in their pea-green boat. The caption is the owl’s guilty admission: ‘I’m afraid there have been… other cats.’ Caleb Carr, in this memoir of his own love affair with a pussycat, is straightfaced: ‘I should own up to the fact that I’d had similar relationships with other cats – even (and in some cases especially) cats who were not mine.’ I have a high tolerance for cat books, but after this one I turned in relief to a ‘Simon’s Cat’ animation on YouTube. There’s one in which a hapless man opens the door for a kitten who has spent hours scrabbling hysterically at the glass like a prisoner longing for escape. The animal then decides that, on reflection, outdoors is overrated.