multiplicities of authorship
A second attempt at my reading diary had me noting down all the books I’ve read since #1. I’ve never before kept such a record, despite how important reading has been to my life and career, including the Memories of Fiction project for which we talked to many readers who kept lists of books they read (discussed in this Book History article).
One thing I’ve noticed among the short list of books I read from March to May is a cluster of four – two creative writing guides, a memoir, and a novel – for which the author is somehow divided or multiple, containing depths and forces beyond rational consciousness.
I picked up Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer (first published in 1983) in Truro’s Oxfam charity shop, and bought Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird (1994) as a result of it being recommended for the Curtis Brown courses I’m about to start (the first activities for my Arts Council development programme). Brande’s book feels especially dated in its default reference to the writer as ‘he’, as well as to the typewriter. I also found its exercises too much to undertake with a busy life of work and family, but nevertheless the idea of the writer as having two parts, or even ‘two persons’ – ‘a prosaic, everyday, practical person’, ‘intelligently critical, detached’, and a shyer, unwieldy, unconscious personality – seems influential. It is echoed again in Lamott’s Bird by Bird, which again considers ‘the unconscious’ to be key to creativity. Both books provide guidance for how to facilitate the ‘part of you that is separate from your rational, conscious mind, this other person with whom you can collaborate’, as Lamott puts it, in order to write creatively.
The memoir I read was Katriona O’Sullivan’s Poor (2023), which describes a different sense of yourself being or becoming another person. It occurs when a friend of Katriona’s parents sexually assaults her as a child: ‘The little version of me, that little girl who did cartwheels… she stayed there in that moment… the new me… went on as someone else…’ It is another sense of a childhood self being stuck in time, of never growing up into the present self, now an author, that also seems key to Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book (2021). In Mott’s novel, an author on a book tour encounters a Black boy, who it turns out has been killed, and who may or may not be the young author. In these books the division is between the child and adult selves (neither of these authors identifying with the children they once were, whoever they were), deriving from traumatic circumstances that trigger dissociation, rather than between unconscious and conscious parts of a more typically whole author. As Brande puts it, again perhaps in rather a dated way, engaging it seems in a mix-up between dissociated personalities (‘Psychopathic’!) and the ‘dual personality’ of an unconscious and conscious self:
our first impulse is to shy violently away from the words ‘dissociation of the personality.’ A dual personality, to the reader who has a number of half-digested notions about the constitution of the mind, is an unlucky fellow who should be in a psychopathic ward; or, at the happiest, a flighty, hysterical creature. Nevertheless, every author is a very fortunate sort of dual personality, and it is this very fact that makes him such a bewildering, tantalizing, irritating figure to the plain man of affairs who flatters himself that he, at least, is all of a piece. But there is no scandal and no danger in recognizing that you have more than one side to your character. The journals and letters of men of genius are full of admissions of their sense of being dual or multiple in their nature.
O’Sullivan and Mott can further unravel any idea of ‘men of genius’ as opposed to the ‘psychopathic’ as they bring experiences of dissociated selves to the heart of brilliant writing on under-represented topics. I cannot really do justice to either of them here.
Other books I’ve read recently include How has Climate Change Affected Your Life? (2024) which doesn’t have a named author but was compiled and curated by Peter Jaeger. It consists of a series of responses to the question of the title; it has multiple authors, in contrast to the books I discussed above, each with a single author who nevertheless contains some kind of divided multiplicity. I much appreciate such a freely available text which I like to dream can oppose the individualism of a competitive, capitalist world, with all its environmental destruction. The first piece – just a hundred words – describes how the knowledge of climate change affects its author with rage and despair. I’ve been unsure about putting my name to this piece, as it contains unhelpful feelings; it was a snapshot, a few minutes in creation, that nevertheless expressed the intensity of these feelings at times, and I love how the pieces all work together, how they jar and resonate and exist in relation to each other, reaching beyond any individual.
Finally, I am looking forward to reading Emma Timpany’s beautifully illustrated Botanical Short Stories, which I’ve just embarked on as it launches in bookshops and garden centres across Cornwall. Timpany’s introduction points out how the word ‘anthology’ derives ‘from the Greek anthologia, from anthos (flower) + logia (collection)’, so is perfect for a group of stories that reflect the wondrous although declining variety of plant life.
*I write differently, and much more about authorship as multiple in Sound Writing (Oxford University Press, 2023).
NB. The other two books I read, which didn’t quite fit into the above but nevertheless connect: Marieke Lucas Rijneveld's The Discomfort of Evening (2018), an awesomely uncomfortable, intimate (if rather lengthy) depiction of an abusive childhood, offering another way to end things.
I also loved Clare Keegan’s Small Things Like These (2020) for its beautifully concise showing of what strikes me as the banality of evil, and the everyday heroism of resisting.
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