Life Writing

So, I have just finished studying a module by this title and it has done some interesting things to my perceptions of travel writing, biography, and autobiography, shifting my boundary lines where fiction and life writing are concerned. This newfound lack of distinction is quite a freeing feeling as a writer, and it also means that the next time someone mentions life writing, my mind won’t automatically groan “Oh Lord, not A Child Called It.” (N.B. I liked A Child Called It really.)

Amongst other texts, we looked at J. M. Coetzee’s Boyhood and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, easily my favourite texts from the term. On our previous module, dedicated supposedly to fiction, we studied A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, by Janna Levin, which details the lives of Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing.

It occurred to my tutor that this last text may have been better placed on our Life Writing module and I agree with him. It connects these two fascinating lives using the smallest details and motifs, most notably, the apple, weaving the two figures into a compelling narrative handling both the scientific and human elements of their lives. The text demonstrates incredible craftsmanship, intelligence, and sensitivity, it’s a really great read.

I found myself gawking at Boyhood also, largely for the narrative approach. The present tense, third person voicing has a bizarre impact, giving an immediacy to the text, whilst separating it from Coetzee himself: the boy in Boyhood is not the writer we have come to know. The tone also spares the reader from the personal benefit-of-hindsight reflections imposed upon so many other memoirs. This allows the text instead to live in the moment, become immersive, so that you totally forget the future of this boy as a Nobel Prize winner.