When you write your memoirs

INTRODUCTION

Autobiographies are all too often confused with memoirs. Famous generals and politicians tend to labour over their memoirs—their successes peppered with one or two failures—when they are in their dotage: something of a last ditch campaign before they give up the ghost. Movie stars and their ilk tend to publish their ‘autobiographies’ when it suits ghost-writers to do the honours for them.

When I began to write these words I wanted to be able to call myself a writer and, with the callowness of youth, I believed that autobiography was merely a literary form to enable the author to write about his life while he is still rather young, still trying to lay the ghost of the experiences that spur him to write: only the aspiring creative writer could really understand the use of the genre of autobiography. Just so.

The plans for this project were triggered, back in 1977, by a dream and, although the events I will relate actually happened, it seems to me–as it must to you—that this tale bears a greater resemblance to a flight of fantasy than to reality. I was not ready then—nor am I ready yet–to contemplate an exhaustive autobiography, a work which would chart every stage of my development, but this is the first vein of such an enterprise. ..... I know there are numerous improvements which I could make, but I am anxious for it to retain its spontaneity—I am sure that the very tone I adopted is as important as the content itself in laying bare the person who wrote it. This is a very personal statement and for that reason it was not with publication in mind that I wrote it; I want to share my yo-yo emotions with you and, as one of the privileged few, I leave it to you to judge the significance of this train in the making of the ‘me’ you know. For better or worse, except for one or two amendments of punctuation and historical accuracy, it stands as I wrote it. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present ......................