Nobody knows their own story better, but laying it out on the page can be far from straightforward.
Memoirs come in all shapes and forms—from the harrowing, such as The Diary of a Young Girl by Ann Frank or Chanel Miller’s Know My Name, to the light-hearted and humorous The Moon’s a Balloon by David Niven.
Most autobiographies entail some degree of overcoming adversity, such as Hilary Mantel’s Giving up the Ghost or Becoming by Michelle Obama.
And the best of them even gets turned into film or television adaptations, such as Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt.
Creating the voice and the tone for memoir writing takes practice, as does establishing the pace and deciding what goes in and what stays out.
Few know the genre better than Helen Macdonald, author of the award-winning and blockbuster movie H is for Hawk.
The non-binary writer’s story of how a goshawk called Mabel helped them grieve for the loss of their father is both a poignant memoir and engaging study of our relationships with the natural world.
Helen believes one of the most important approaches to any form of writing is to treat readers with respect.
They said: “They may know as much as you do—and if they don’t, they don’t want to be told how lucky they are to have you tell them all about it.
“Military techno-thrillers are often packed with acronyms like SOSUS and AIM-9s and Pratt & Whitney J-57s, and even if you don’t know what the hell those things are, you feel you’re being talked to as an equal when you encounter them on the page.
“Same goes for nature.”
While memoir writing, like almost all other genres, should never be prescriptive, following some basic rules does bode well for the finished manuscript.
Not looking through rose-tinted glasses while at the keyboard is a good start, according to Helen.
“If there are burned-out cars and shotgun-addled road signs, or a creek full of trash and a high-security perimeter fence alongside the singing nightingale, don’t leave them out.
“That’s how this world is—honour it.”
As well as the memoir H is for Hawk, Helen has also released a poetry anthology, Shaler’s Fish, a study of humans’ relationships with the world’s fastest birds, Falcon, and a collection of nature-inspired essays, Vesper Flights.
They believe a warts-and-all approach to explaining reactions and relationships with what you encounter is vital.
Helen added: “Jokes, sex, brand names, illness, food, insomnia, laziness, movie references, lovesickness, yeast cookery, even the history of armoured vehicles – the list is pretty much endless.
“David Gessner’s wonderful essay collection Sick of Nature is glorious on this—he complains productively of how tired and sick he is, not of nature, but the ‘hushed voice’ and ‘saintliness’ of a certain kind of writing about it.”
Macdonald writes about the deeply human concerns of how our ways of being in nature will shape the planet—and us—in the years to come.