I have been thinking a lot about biography recently, and reading lots and
lots of them as I am presenting a workshop on writing biography in a few weeks
time for the ACT Writers Centre. One of the issues I have been contemplating is
the ethics of the biographer, and the respect he or she must show to the
subject in telling their life story. I believe that a biographer holds a
special responsibility of ensuring that, as much as possible, the subject’s
voice is heard, and not drowned out by the biographer’s.
One of the books I read was Kate Grenville’s One Life. My Mother’s Story.
Nance Russell wrote in one of her many
notebooks: ‘I’ve often thought about writing a book—other people do it all the
time—it can’t be all that hard. Up till now I’ve never had the time or the
right pencil but now that I have one foot in the grave, so to speak, it’s time
to get on with it.’ She didn’t, but she left a legacy of notebooks and
interviews recorded by her daughter, author Kate Grenville.[i]
Faced with this embarrassment
of riches after her mother passed away, Grenville initially transcribed 100,000
or so of Nance’s, words and decided to organise it into a family record. she told Susan Wyndham, the literary editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, that ‘I knew it really mattered to Mum and I had this sense
that this was a resource for the future that someone would find and treasure,
for the very reason that this is about ordinary people’. The highly regarded
author then tried to blend her mother’s writings and recollections, as well as
her own memories and related research, but released that her mother’s story
would appeal to a broader readership rather than to just the family. But at
that point, Grenville realised that ‘I had a book with many
different voices jostling to be heard’. And it seems that one of them was that
of a much published writer who had developed her own particular style.
‘It
wasn’t until about draft 22 or 23 that I took the radical and very emotionally
difficult step of throwing out all the actual pieces of Mum’s memoir and tapes,
so her verbatim voice is now embedded in sentences that I have written.’ The
only time the reader hears Nance’s voice in One Life. My Mother’s Story is in the photo captions.
And it is a shame as, from those, we gain an immediate sense of her humour and
vitality. Grenville ‘felt as if I was pushing her away’ but to me it was more
than that. She was in effect silencing her mother when her mother had left a
significant written and oral legacy. There is
no denying the book’s literary merits, and I enjoyed it, but the
novelist that is Grenville, the author of 13 other books had taken over. ‘That
step’ of denying her mother her own voice ‘has made it into a book, as opposed
to a compilation of family stories.’ But what sort of book?[ii]
Is it really her mother’s story? Or Grenville’s.
[i]
http://www.smh.com.au/good-weekend/kate-grenvilles-new-life-as-a-single-woman-20150320-13vbim.html
[ii]
http://www.smh.com.au/good-weekend/kate-grenvilles-new-life-as-a-single-woman-20150320-13vbim.html
