A new industry is shaping itself around our memories. First there were the companies who could build a glossy family photo album overnight, bookish objects that ordered and elevated blurry phone pictures into a story of pure love and redemption. Recently, new businesses have launched with similar aims but higher ambitions.
Piling up in my emails are producers advertising services where they’ll “create family documentaries”, editing a day of interviews into a film – “a permanent memory of you”. Biographers are promoting retreats where guests will “write their life story”, while those who’d prefer someone else to do it can employ a ghost writer, with one company offering a package that includes a set of hardback memoirs from £7,500. For those at the end of their lives, a new charity called Stories for Life trains “life biographers” to record the memories of people in hospices, palliative care and residential homes: “We believe everyone has a story to tell and a legacy to leave behind.” Suddenly, ordinary lives are of note.
The impulse to document our lives is not new. The impulse to record a life in flashes and notes, a liquid diary that drips across social media and puddles on shelves in an Ikea frame, has ancient roots. Even when we’re not publishing them we’re doing it, telling our stories in pubs, in our heads, in our updates about lunch. The difference today seems to be the growing realisation that narrative is important. A beginning, a middle and then, an end.
I watched Barbara Windsor’s 1992 episode of This Is Your Life the other day on YouTube – “Darling, you can’t do my life,” she shrieked gorgeously upon being presented with the big red book on stage. “It’s too naughty!” They didn’t show the naughty bits; it was filtered of pulp and scandal. Watching the show from the distance of 20 years I remembered the cosiness of the format, but also how very odd it was – a celebrity would witness their eulogy, and the show would end not with their death but with the book closing mid-story, beside a lineup of famous friends in formal skirt suits, and someone doing a dance, and Paul Daniels glistening.
We have read enough celebrity memoirs now to understand the value of good editing, and can see how even the tale of the most accomplished person can read like sound and fury, signifying nothing. Every day our phone’s photo app spits memories at us – a baby with an ice-cream, a plate of spaghetti, the day we met a horse – but there’s value in organising our memories ourselves. However little these lives seem, they get bigger on the page. And they transform in other ways, too: a single event can mutate from a scene of despair to one of hope; one of humiliation to one of hilarity. There’s research that shows the way we tell our life stories directly affects the way we feel about our lives: if we try to remember the good things that came out of a bad experience it’s more likely we will “enjoy a greater sense of wellbeing and satisfaction in life”. Which suggests that we have some power, as the narrator of our own stories, to change the endings, to choose our own adventure.
Seen like this, the wasted time – the jobless years in debt and bed, or the long cold months with a man who smelled of ham – is suddenly rich with meaning. If you hadn’t experienced the joyless trek across his body all those lonely nights you would not have learned what you wanted from a boyfriend. If you hadn’t woken to a refreshing Sticky Rib Pot Noodle every afternoon for three years you would not have built up this hunger for a career. They weren’t just boring, hard, painful days, they were plot points! All those bruising falls, on pavements, through relationships, can be given meaning retrospectively – they weren’t all simply your fault, they were evidence of struggle. Of battles eventually won.
The autobiography industry has identified a need: nobody wants to be forgotten. We want these small lives remembered. We want to find meaning in these waking days, even days dampened by sadness and called off due to rain. The service offered by Stories for Life is upsettingly important, that offer of a witness, and the chance to record happy memories, at a time when sad ones are overwhelming. And (aside from gentle narcissism) the reason the other businesses will thrive is because so many of us want to memorialise our lives yet remain unreliable narrators, or awfully harsh in our edits. We storm in stinking of beer, or rolling our eyes at the character’s idiocy, meaning the story skews to the left or falls over completely.
But now the need has been identified we can choose whether or not we want to pay. If a diary feels like too much responsibility, or a personal documentary too much work, it’s satisfying to realise that we’re writing our autobiographies every day, in the ways we frame our stories to friends, or how we silently shape a memory. It matters that we talk about our lives, but what matters more is how we talk about them.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
