(Photo Kirsty Anderson)

Damian Barr has been on my literary radar for many years. He is so generous in his supporting role of writers by hosting brilliant literary salons – I attended the early ones in Shoreditch; now international – both live and online (he featured Sins of My Father, last year); but he is also a fine writer, his memoir Maggie and Me often pops up on my memoir courses as highly recommended. And a firm advocate of the form.

His latest venture is a three-part series for BBC Sounds, ‘Whose Truth is it Anyway?’ (Sunday, 4.30pm; Radio 4), which takes memoir, fiction and autofiction to task in asking, What is true and who decides? The first episode is on memoir, told from a backdrop of Brighton, Damian’s hometown, where he revisits his process of writing Maggie and Me. In discussion with writers Jenn Ashworth (author of anti-memoir, Notes Made While Falling) and Alexandra Heminsley (author of four memoirs, the latest being Somebody to Love), Damian touches on the importance of memoirists being honest about their limitations, that truth is subjective, and events selected in service to ‘story’. He also ventures off to see his editor (the lovely Gillian Stern), his legal editor (who did the nerve-wracking lawyer’s report) and a close friend who features in the book, to remind us of memoir’s collaborative nature. We all get hung up on the challenges of writing about others, and it was heartening to hear his friend talk of her trust and support of Damian as writer, that writing about others can be a form of memorialising them, creating a life anew – and you know you’ve succeeded if they consider this a gift!

I found the third episode on autofiction particularly interesting, as I hadn’t really got a grasp of the definition of this form. Olivia Laing situates it as a kind of merging of memoir and fiction, but more importantly as a genre of our time: how the writer can take on the persona of another character, to explore perhaps elements of the self that they don’t want to expose through straight nonfiction. It can be liberating to writers like Laing, whose previous works have been more aligned with memoir, because it becomes a kind of hiding place, and takes off the pressure of having to be fair or accurate. In my own work, I’ve been interested in exploring a hybrid of fiction and memoir for much the same reason, and I can see how autofiction is more playful perhaps, a kind of meta genre that allows a writer to experiment, and to highlight the slippery nature of truth through the form itself. Editor Ellah Wakatama Allfrey was fascinating on this, and her ambition to support writers who stand apart from the literary canon, particularly if traditionally they have been ‘othered’; and the importance of allowing these writers a space to create a literary form that was not there before.

I felt inspired listening to these episodes, to read more widely,to question my motifs, to try to write out of my comfort zone. But I also couldn’t help reflecting again on why I love memoir, how its dedication to honesty and directness feels safer to me somehow. We have to take down the mask, if not entirely, then at least long enough to examine it and try to understand why it is there. It is a challenge to write difficult truths in a way that both exposes and protects.

Damian Barr’s, ‘Whose Truth is it Anyway?’ first airs on Sunday, 4.30pm Radio 4