Today many of us have an insatiable desire to know everything about the private lives of members of the royal family, politicians, film stars and celebrities. Others prefer to look backwards to uncover family secrets, or insights into what might have made us who we are.
However, while the internet has given us unprecedented access to information about our own roots and to tittle-tattle about famous people, writing about lives has a long and distinguished past. Plutarch was fascinated by the parallel lives of great men; Doctor Johnson, by comparison, maintained it was possible to write the life of a broomstick. While Oscar Wilde described biographers as the “body snatchers” of literature, Virginia Woolf left a vast legacy to life writing through her autobiographical novels, her biographies (including the fantastical Orlando) and her letters and diaries. In the 20th century Sigmund Freud gave biographers the freedom to delve into the psyche of their subject.
A century later, life writing has never been more lively or diverse. Celebrity memoirs regularly top the bestsellers’ list and all big publishers offer traditional “cradle-to-grave” biographies of writers, entertainers and politicians. But there is also a demand for unexpected and surprising examples of life writing, books that cross genres or borrow techniques from fiction. Edmund de Waal’s epic family history, The Hare with Amber Eyes, which spans centuries and continents, and Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which tackles race and medical ethics, have both sold thousands of copies around the world.
The secrets of a life might be waiting to be discovered in a musty attic, or in a temperature-controlled annex of the National Archives. Or, if you are writing a memoir, perhaps you are just looking for the courage and inspiration to tell your story in a way that will grip your reader – whether you want that reader to be your grandchild, or someone browsing in a bookshop. Life writing is a wonderful mixture of research, looking for the right structure on which to hang that research and then, finally, beginning to find the voice to tell that story. This summer programme offers the chance to do all three – and to learn from the experience of other students who are facing the same challenges, but, perhaps, from a different perspective or from within a different historical period. A summer programme will send you home with ideas, inspiration and the tools to start building a life story.
