Reflection and Memory: A Conversation with Damian Barr
“Just as stories change as we read them, stories change as we tell them. So, to who or what are we being reliable? To the law? To our parents? There is no universal truth. We have to accept that what we owe is a loyalty to ourselves and to the people we value around us.”
Photo taken by Daisy Honeybunn
First of all, for all our readers who maybe don’t know about your work, would you be able to tell us a little bit about what you do and what brought you to where you are today?
Well, my life is books. It's writing my own books - I've written a memoir called Maggie and Me and a novel called You’ll Be Safe Here and lots of essays and pieces for different collections. My background is as a journalist; I joined the Times when I left University and continue to write for broadsheets. The other part of my life, which really enriches my writing, is running my salon, Damian Barr’s Literary Salon, and the work that I do on TV and radio to promote, support and discover other writers.
The salon started fifteen years ago; our first event was at Shoreditch House, and I wanted to start a book event that was fun, which didn’t take itself too seriously – that doesn't mean that it's not serious and it doesn’t mean we don't have people being provocative or sharing intellectual ideas – it just means that we don't approach it with a self-satisfaction which I think is the bain of a lot of literary culture. So, from the start it has always been irreverent; it has always been authentic, and there will always be a real mis of people. You'll get debut writers – I remember when Naomi Alderman joined as a debut writer, and I remember David Nicholls launching One Day at one of our salons. And also, people come back, so David has launched every book with us ever since, and Maggie O'Farrell did her one and only event for Hamnet with us. We're really blessed that authors come back to us time after time. I wanted it to feel accessible.
We’ve hosted it at all kinds of different homes over the years, including various hotels, the British Library, and other venues all over the world. It also feels really important to me to try and make the events as accessible as possible, so we have a podcast too and a YouTube channel and, like everyone else, during the pandemic, we had to find a way of becoming virtual. And I'm so grateful to all the people who found the magic to make that happen.
Like your magazine issues, we have a theme of some kind – a reason to have two people on together, and I really like mixing established and emerging authors because it results in interesting cross-conversation. People might come for the big name but that way they discover somebody that they don't know which is lovely. So, for example, we did a brilliant event recently with Kit de Waal and Abi Morgan all about memoirs, and we also did an event with Mohsin Zaidi and Miriam Margolyes, again about queer memoir.
In answer to your question, I talk about other people’s books – that’s it in a nutshell!
That's incredible and it feels like a really nice tie in with nb., especially the idea of coming to something, maybe through a big name, and it leads you to discover authors you might never have seen. And we have a similar thing with our team where, if we feature a book in nb., it means that at least one member of our team loves it – there has to be that passion behind it.
Talking about themes, our theme for this issue is reflection. One of the ways we’re thinking about this is in terms of memoir, and in the lovely piece you wrote for us, you mentioned a quote by Vivian Gornick which I just wanted to read and talk about because I loved it so much and am still thinking about it, even though I’m not 100% sure I have quite figured out exactly what I take it from it yet…
‘Everywhere literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot, the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer, the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say’
This made me think about the conversation we all have between our past and present selves: so, we all have a story, a past and our experiences – the plot – but when we reflect on it and try to write about it, that reflection is coloured by our present situation and all our preoccupations and thoughts that we’ve accumulated through your life. So, I wanted to talk to you about how that resonates with you and whether it holds true for all your writing?
Your question takes it to the next level, which I think is really interesting! So Gornick’s work is incredible for anyone who's trying to write, whether they are trying to write memoir or fiction, because in both instances you're constructing a story; in memoir, you’re saying, ‘believe me, this is true’ and in fiction you’re saying, ‘this isn't true, but believe me. In both instances, you’re asking readers to believe, and even though there's a different convention underlying each one, you’re using the same tools of character and plot.
Let's set the aspect of past and present to one side for a second and talk about the idea of story and the situation. So, if I asked you to tell me about your childhood and you said ‘well this happened when I was eight, and this happened when I was twelve, and, you know, I only realised when I was sixteen that what happened when I was eight was actually more important than what happened when I was twelve’, it becomes clear that we’re constantly revisiting and re-litigating our own childhoods and our adulthoods too. I think that that’s the situation. The story is what it all means. So, if we’re thinking about the writing process, the writing is the situation, and the editing is the story. In both Maggie and Me and You Will be Safe Here, the story is survival.
My memoir is the story of 1980s childhood in the West of Scotland and my novel is set almost entirely in South Africa, mostly in the 1900s during the Second World War. And I wanted to do something really different with my novel that would really set me apart from my memoir and, of course, what I ended up doing was writing about survival, which I'm obsessed by, and mothers and sons, which I'm obsessed by, and love and friendship, which I'm also obsessed by. So, although the situations couldn't be more different, the story is the same. Also, I think it's interesting to think about whether writers can escape our stories. Should we have to? Can we?
So, I think the situation and the story is a really helpful way of thinking about your writing as you approach it because it can't all just be situation – that would be a diary or an anecdote, not a great piece of writing that is going to change somebody’s life, including you, the writer.
Fascinating. On that note, this may be an impossible question to answer, but do you think that any of us can be reliable narrators of our own lives? Is that possible?
I think it depends on the truth people want to hear. If you think about something that happened to you when you were young and how you talked about it then, you will invariably talk about it differently now. Your experience of reading something like Catcher in the Rye as a teenager will be very different from the experience of reading Catcher in the Rye in your twenties, thirties, forties, fifties or eighties. And so, I feel like just as stories change as we read them, stories change as we tell them. So, to who or what are we being reliable? To the law? To our parents? There is no universal truth. We have to accept that what we owe is a loyalty to ourselves and to the people we value around us.
In memoir, I worried so much about getting stuff wrong, about offending my family, about upsetting them, about people judging them. At one point me and my sister were talking about something that had happened and she could not only not remember that it had happened – this huge event that really scarred me, but she couldn’t remember living in the house that it had happened in. And I thought to myself, if my sister can forget a whole house, what have I forgotten? What have I left out? And isn’t it alright to accept that we can’t remember everything? Should we not just accept from the beginning that we are fallible, if we can accept that memoir is not about remembering. Because there's fact, and then there's truth, and too many facts can get in the way of the truth. Often, we’re obsessed by facts because they stop us thinking about the truth – being confronted by it or realising that what we’ve told ourselves is true isn’t true. We've cast ourselves as the hero when in fact we are the villain, or, actually, it’s all just a bit more complicated and messier.
With my novel, I was confronting the ‘truth’ of empire – which was that the Boer Wars were good, Britain was benevolent, that the concentration camps were a necessary response to the brutality of these African people. I was deconstructing this imperial ‘truth’ and also challenging the ‘truth’ of white South Africans who had cast themselves as victims in order to justify the horror of Apartheid and the subsequent responses to the dismantling of that system or the beginning of the dismantling of that system. So, you know, I don't know any reliable narrators, I only know unreliable narrators. I find certainty terrifying.
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The full interview can be read in our Reflection Issue.
