Leslie Jamison, a writer I admire – author of the Empathy Exams and The Recovering, along with some very fine long form essays – recently posted on Twitter her teaching summary for the upcoming semester, a module on ‘The Self’. It was retweeted a number of times with lots of responses from people like me, saying: Wish I was a fly on the wall. Wish I could join your class, and so on. Such a shame that she’s all the way over there in America.

I have been reflecting on it as I plan my teaching of narrative non-fiction at Bath Spa University, and along with the authors, she lists, which anyone interested in constructions of self in literature should follow – Saint Augustine, Annie Ernaux, Audre Lord, Terese Marie Mailhot, Claudia Rankine, Chris Kraus, James Baldwin, James Agee, Vauhini Vara, Sei Shonagon, Cathy Park Hong, Ross Gay, Nathalie Leger, and Saidiya Hartman, among them – there are some curious statements I wanted to unpick:

‘I feel the shame of self interest’ This is in relation to Jamison proclaiming that people often say, ‘I am just not that interested in myself’ and her response – but I am interested in myself, and I am interested in other people who are also interested in themselves, and writers who are interested in exploring themselves on the page. Yes, I agree. She signs off by saying, ‘I am interested in the idea that being interested in yourself deepens your capacity to be interested in other people.’ This is the statement that strikes me the hardest, as it brings me back to something I have taught my memoir students in the past which is a rebuke to the statement that we memoirists are solipsistic, self-obsessed monsters – yes, I’ve heard it a couple of times. What if writing memoir actually isn’t an act of narcissism but more an anti narcissism, a generosity, to lay yourself bare and open because others don’t have the guts, capacity, time to do so? What if digging into the self in order to find the universal helps others open up, however initially painful?  We lift the blanket; we dig in the mud; we see shades in the darkness. We bring it out into the light. And in turn we grow in empathy for our fellow humans. Like archeologists, we dig deep into the psyche in order to understand ourselves so we can empathise with the universals of pain, of grief, of love and of loss.

As memoirists, perhaps we should not be afraid to be accused of navel-gazing, we should be more afraid of the uncomfortable emotions that our exploration of self – and truth – brings up in those who read us, and the chain of events that follow. Did it cause a conversation to be had? Did it throw stones at years of stagnant silence? Did it shake the world awake? We must be prepared to be blamed for causing hurt, regardless of what that hurt leads to.

And what about writing about the ordinary life? Jamison specifies constructing a self who is  ‘simultaneous, hungry and changing, restless and tender, built from scenes and fragments and breakfast preferences and half-smoked cigarettes and curt words papering-over unspoken vulnerabilities.’ Isn’t this one of the biggest challenges to the memoirist, to make the mundane interesting? Seeing the truth in the simple everyday occurrences and conversations, the nuance of you and me, over there on the settee. What is being said and what is hidden. This is what interests me the most.

And in my personal life I have learned to look for meaning in all that happens, both the joy and (especially) the pain, then to understand it through the prism of story. Believe me it helps. Imagine if we didn’t have that? If everything was meaningless, just a sequence of disappointment and struggle, how incredibly desperate and senseless. I once told someone in defiance (I was hurt by something they had said) that writing is my religion, and however pretentious that sounds, I stand by it. The world would look a completely different place without it.