Writing about the family is what I do – not only this column, but in my novels and other journalistic excursions. It is an area of writing fraught with difficulties – mostly to do with issues of privacy and diplomacy.
For all its pitfalls, the recording of family life can never have been so prolific. Death, divorce, trauma, disease – all are meticulously recorded not only in the pages of newspapers such as this, but in memoirs and biographies. Our appetite for the intimate seems never to have been so great.
What is it that has led to this great outpouring of familial confession? It is surely propelled in part by technology, which has acted as a window on ordinary lives. People post their private lives on social media now as a matter of course, and no one blinks an eye.
It may seem ironic, or scarcely credible, coming from me – squeezing, as I have, every last drop of juice from the thin stuff of my life into printer’s ink – but this tendency, while on the whole healthy (if often trivial), can have its darker side, as I know only too well. The erosion of personal space is not neutral. Your life is other people’s lives too, and it behoves anyone when writing their story to take care with that responsibility.
On the whole, I hope I have done more good than harm – but having used the ladder of personal confession to climb into a relatively well-paid profession, I now find myself often feeling the wish to pull it up and set fire to it. I wonder how many more stories of battles with cancer/finding lost relatives/recovering from or succumbing to drug addiction we can take before we are entirely gorged.
What are we trying to learn? Or are we simply trying to take solace in the fact that others suffer as we do? (These stories, by definition almost, do not tend to focus on the joyful or successful elements of life.)
So ubiquitous are family revelations now that it is difficult to remember how recent a phenomenon this trend is. Although not unheard of before, this still cresting wave started with Ian Jack writing in Granta magazine in 1987 about his father, Finished with Engines. I remember thinking at the time not only what a stunning piece it was, but also how ground-breaking – simply because it was about, so to speak, nobody special, ie Ian Jack’s very ordinary father. At that time, nobody would have thought to run a piece at such length about someone who wasn’t a celebrity (or as they said then, “famous”).
Jack inspired a generation of writers about family life, myself included. Blake Morrison, Nick Hornby, Mary Karr and others built on this elevation of the domestic, all of them brilliantly. But it wasn’t long before the form began to decay, and it has tended more and more towards a form of emotional pornography – the vomiting on to the page of any revelation that, however badly expressed, might shift a few units on the bookshelves.
Now, more than 25 years after Finished with Engines, I sometimes have a sense that the form of the intimate family narrative is tiring – that all the revelations have been revealed, that all the secrets have been hauled, willingly or not, into the light of day. Perhaps, like pornography, the demand is inexhaustible. But as I grow older, the virtues of privacy grow more attractive – although it is far too late for me to claim them.
The pendulum will one day perhaps swing back again, and we will come to resemble more the Victorians in their self-censorship and fierce protection of personal family space. Such a trend may be sorely overdue – depriving writers like me of a living would be a small price to pay.
• Tim Lott’s novel The Last Summer of the Water Strider is published by Scribner, £16.99.
