In My Life
Turning your experiences into memoir, autobiography and newspaper columns
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Writing from life
For many years I wrote about my life in newspaper columns in print and online.
One was called Papercuts, which began as a general reflection on topical subjects but evolved into humorous (well, they were meant to be humorous) ruminations on parenthood (I began writing the column around the time my daughter was born 20 years ago).
It was well received and would generate a lot of interest from readers who had experienced events similar to those I was writing about. But after three or four years I was feeling the strain of keeping it going
Then I wrote a purely online newspaper column called Nappy Hour following the birth of my son 16 years ago. This was short-lived as I soon ran out of things to say on such a narrow subject.
Latterly I wrote another weekly column for the group of papers I was working for in which I just went down a different rabbit hole each week. Essentially I was following whatever passion or interest I had that week. The column never had a title, it just appeared alongside a picture of me and my byline.
It was great and I loved writing it. I found myself writing about snippets of forgotten local history or forgotten people of achievement. It wasn’t forced, there was no requirement to be funny.
‘I booked the Beatles’
One of my favourites was interviewing the man who had booked the Beatles to play one of their only gigs in Warrington, Cheshire.
Now in his late 70s, this chap, Pete Rigby, sent me a copy of the letter he’d received from Beatles manager Brian Epstein confirming the terms of the contract.
Pete had subsequently sold the letter for £1,400. “I had a good holiday in Vegas on that,” he told me.
Father’s Day
I’ve always enjoyed the humorous slice-of-life columnists: it was a form mastered in the US in the 1920s, 30s and 40s by Robert Benchley, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker and S. J. Perelman. The greats here in Britain include those from the halcyon days of Punch from the 1960s to the 80s such as Alan Coren, Miles Kington. Today we have Caitlin Moran and Jeremy Clarkson.
Bill Bryson, best known for his travel and science books, always told with humour, wrote a brilliant column for the Mail on Sunday’s Night & Day magazine, collected as Notes from a Big Island.
Less well known for their humorous columns than their novels were Maeve Binchy (queen of the romance saga) and Sue Townsend (author of the exquisitely funny Adrian Mole books). It really is worth picking up a copy of each of their collected columns.
For me Hunter Davies is perhaps the best journalist and writer able to spin a real-life event into a sparkling and funny thousand-word piece.
As a teenager I found a copy of his collected Father’s Day columns from Punch magazine.
When Davies’ son was born in 1966 he decided to use his experience of helping to deliver the baby in a column.
He’d recently read an article by an American doctor who had cooked and eaten her own placenta. He’d also heard that a young mum who lived a few streets away had done the same thing.
As he was the editor of the Sunday Times’ women’s page at the time, he decided to cook the placenta from the birth of his son with some onions.
“Margaret was appalled at the idea,” Davies recalled (his wife was the late, great writer Margaret Forster). “I had two bites of it and it was horrible,” he later said. He went to the end of his garden and dug a hole and buried it.
Although he stopped writing Father’s Day decades ago, he is still writiing columns for the New Statesman (The Fan, about his love of football), the Sunday Times money section (Mean With Money, about being a tight wad and has also written a column about stamp collecting and a general column for Cumbria Life.
That is quite some output, in addition to writing more than 100 books. Davies is 87 and shows no sign of stopping. His recent books include the memoirs Happy Old Me, A Life in the Day and Love in Old Age: My Year in the Wight House.
I think the placenta story demonstrate the lengths to which some writers and journalists will go in pursuit of a thousand words!
What stories do you have that you could capture in writing?