In this series of interviews, I will be talking to memoirists, both published and working towards publication, about their writing process, and how writing memoir has helped them better understand themselves and their place in the world. I am also interested in how a writer navigates difficult territory for themselves and those they love. As well as featuring the interviews here on my blog site, I will be using them as research for my upcoming publication, INTO BEING: The Radical Craft of Memoir and its Power to Transform (published by MUP in 2025).

My twelfth interview is with Catherine Taylor whose memoir The Stirrings: A Memoir in Northern Time is a moving account of growing up in Sheffield in the 1970s and 1980s amidst the haunting threat of nuclear war and the Yorkshire Ripper, and more general insidious mysogyny of the times. It is a beautifully written memoir, precise and informative, and page-turning,

Catherine Taylor was born in Waikato, Aotearoa New Zealand, and grew up in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. She was publisher at The Folio Society and is former deputy director of English PEN. Her reviews and features have appeared in Prospect, Jewish Quarterly, Guardian, The Economist, New Statesman, Financial Times and the TLS, among other publications. She has also written for Aeon and Granta. Catherine edited The Book of Sheffield: a City in Short Fiction, for Comma Press in 2019. It was chosen as the Big City Read by Sheffield Libraries in 2020. The Stirrings is her first book. She lives in London.

When and how did you realise you had to write The Stirrings?

I’d had the idea of the book for about 30 years, but it wasn’t until the death of my mother in 2016 (my father died in 2009) that I really felt I *had* to write the book, and write it as memoir, before it was too late and I forgot everything.

Did it start with an image, or an emotion, or first line, or an idea – or none of the above?

It really started with a story I used to tell, or rather a line, whenever the subject of Peter Sutcliffe, the serial killer known as the Yorkshire Ripper, happened to come up. “He was caught behind my school In Sheffield” I’d say, because that is what happened – and that’s how the germ of The Stirrings began. And also the title was there for ages – it was never really going to be called anything else. It’s a title that’s very pertinent to a radical period of Sheffield history and it’s a double-meaning title, too – because my memoir is a book about becoming, what we might call, in a now rather old-fashioned sense, “coming of age”.

Did it feel essential that you do it? Was the need urgent? Persistent?

It became more persistent as time passed. Essential, yes. I wanted to make sense of, to appraise, that period of my early life when a lot of significant occurrences – let’s call them events – seemed to take place: an acceleration of conflict in society and politics and in my own life, too. I felt quite freed by a couple of examples, as if given permission – Joanna Hogg’s autobiographical film The Souvenir, in which she recreated a tragedy that took place during her formative years and turned it into art, and the auto-fiction of Annie Ernaux, particularly her very short book Happening, about the illegal abortion she had while a university student. Both of these definitely influenced my decision to write the book.

What is it about memoir that appeals to you?

I generally prefer non-fiction to fiction and I’m an essayist and journalist. I did attempt the book as a novel but it didn’t work, it seemed too elaborate and unreal. And as I was putting a lot of actual history in there – from the Greenham Common peace camp to the Miners’ Strike and of course the Ripper murders – I needed to weave my own story around that and it seemed more natural to write it as it happened. It would, doubtless, have been easier, emotionally at least, to write it as fiction.

Did your narrative voice come naturally, and your authority as the person telling this story, or was that something you needed to work on – did it come more easily the deeper you went into writing the book and your research?

The narrative voice didn’t feel too problematic to me, but starting a book is never easy. I wanted to write impressionistically, from my memories of very early childhood – literally from infancy – my beginning, rather like the first chapter of David Copperfield: “I am Born” – and for it to be very fragmented, then the whole to gradually cohere as the book goes on. I saw myself as a character and a persona to some extent. (My editor actually referred to me as “she” sometimes when we discussed the book, so it must have worked!) The main challenge I had was not what to write but how to write it. I went back and forth over that. Then during the first lockdown, March-June 2020, I was completely alone for three months and like many people, separated from my partner and family. I was overdue an essay for a tiny publisher called Dodo Ink for an anthology called Trauma: Art and Mental Health. I started to write about how the lockdown and being cut off from everyone reminded me of the before and after of my parents’ divorce and my subsequent estrangement from my father. After I’d written the essay I realised I’d got the form for The Stirrings.

And how did you navigate writing about family members or those who are close to you?

A lot of readers have said that in the book I sometimes come across as an only child – and that was quite deliberate. No one is begging their family member to write a memoir, let’s face it! So I didn’t name my siblings or my parents, I wrote about them quite remotely. And also, I am very much the youngest so while I grew up in a big family, I also spent a lot of time alone. In some ways I was a very solitary child. Everyone else in the book gets a pseudonym; there are composite characters, some changes of place and so forth. There are no physical descriptors apart from of me. I did consult some of my friends on preferred pseudonyms!

Did you share the text with relevant people before it went to press? Did you give them veto as to what was kept?

No, the only person who saw the text up to final edits and before going into the production schedule was my editor. My family, for example, was fully aware I was writing the book but I didn’t ask for permission, or give anything to veto. The book, as I have stressed, is purely from my perspective. I did check out a couple of issues raised by the legal read. Two of my siblings read it at proof stage. They loved it, fortunately.

Were there aspects of your story that you resisted, that you thought you could get away with not writing, but then realised it wasn’t possible – and if so, how did you protect yourself, or how did it feel to write those sections?

I cut about 20,00 words from the original draft. I left out some major aspects of family history and other incidents during the years I covered, mainly because I either felt that it was not my story to tell, or because it didn’t move the narrative along. As for what I resisted: nothing really, because you should never publish what you don’t want anyone to read. I thought a lot about that, and about how memoir is only a fraction of one’s life, and not all of it, and no one is entitled to know everything about you just because you’ve chosen to share some aspects. But obviously there were things that were hard to write about, particularly the decision to terminate an unplanned pregnancy. But I wrote that chapter first and it was also part of my draft proposal, so lots of potential editors had seen it. My parents splitting up when I was nine is also one that was hard to revisit. And the sudden death of my friend at university. I’d buried that for a long time, so that was probably the most difficult chapter. I am pretty good at switching off and compartmentalising, something I taught myself when my parents divorced, (survival mode) but it could be overwhelming at times.

Was it a process to become ‘ready’ or ‘prepared’ to go to the places that you might have otherwise resisted?

Yes, I simply shut out the rest of the world. (Much of the book was written during lockdown two, and I didn’t really socialise again until late in 2021, when the first draft was almost finished.) Again, I am quite adept at that, even if it sounds rather dramatic. I also immersed myself in the music, films, tv, books, news articles etc of the period, or the ones that I had most connected with at the time.

Did you have any rituals to protect yourself?

Hmm, no not really. I have a very definite sense of who I am, and I feel, like most writers I guess, that I am both the book and also entirely separate from it. But talking about the past is hard, with events and so on, so I do have to shake myself out of it quite often, and focus on the here and now. I went for a lot of walks while writing The Stirrings! Much tea was drunk. Did I mention my love of Ritz crackers?

Do you think personal narrative is a platform for exploring the unspeakable? Or even the unthinkable? If so, please expand:

I do but not necessarily any more than fiction or any other form of writing.

How is memoir different from lived experience?

It can only be an imperfect reflection. A fleeting, tantalising glimpse. In order to conjure up the past I actually had to undertake some physical role-play on occasion – such as the simple action of pushing a hair grip through my hair, like I used to at school. A whole host of memories and impressions returned with that, and some were not what I expected: it was extraordinary and a little bit scary.

Do you write a journal and if so, how did that help when it came to writing your memoir?

I don’t write a journal. As an editor and a journalist I found that experience and discipline very useful when self-editing.  I have also kept everything personal to me  – photos, letters, postcards, cinema and gig tickets, birthday cards. I grew up in a pre-digital age and I had a whole time capsule at my disposal. I even had my 1990 wall-planner from university!

Does writing memoir offer cohesion to otherwise fractured memories and experience, and is that cohesion empowering? If so, expand on why?

I think it does although you have to be careful with it, this firework you’ve got in your hands. I do look back with more compassion on my younger self – she had a lot going on – and I think I was perhaps a bit hard on her in the book. But then I’m self-deprecating and not very sentimental so it had to be so. (Emotional, yes, sentimental, no.) It made me more fully aware of the pattern my parents’ divorce has played in my own life choices – ostensibly there have been much more devastating things happen to me, but that was the one that affected me the most, mainly because of the disastrous way it was handled. My world fell apart overnight, and nothing was ever the same again. I also found that the really horrible time I endured at school became merely anecdotal in my head as I wrote the book – I’m not dismissing the impact, but that bit of my past no longer has any power over me.

And did your recalling of memories lead to more memories that had been buried?

I mentioned the game with the hair grip – yes, more sudden flashes than complete memories. But I have no new memories of my father, and that makes me immensely sad. I didn’t see him at all the from the age of 16 to 30, and I hadn’t seen him for six years when he died. We didn’t really know each other, and I think that the trauma of the divorce led me to blank out a lot of my early childhood – what I refer to as the “before times”.

Do you think memoir has the power to change lives, both that of the writer and that of the reader?

It certainly does. I’ve always read memoir, from Simone de Beauvoir when I was a teenager – in a kind of “show me how to live!” type way – but it’s also a construction and an artifice, however authentic the voice or indeed the recollection. (I cite de Beauvoir because she certainly knew all about constructing a persona). It can change the life of the writer for good and bad – there aren’t really any halfway measures. No word is ever the final word. Personally, it’s led to some fascinating discussions with some of my closest friends about their own lives, and it’s been brilliant to interact with readers more generally.

How has writing The Stirrings changed your life?

The actual physical writing of the book has changed my life more than the publishing process. It’s given me much more confidence, because I actually wrote a book. I think the writing is always going to be the most important aspect, even what gets left out. I feel I understand myself a bit better now, although I certainly didn’t write it for therapy, or closure, or that dread word: catharsis. I like to write a good sentence. And then another one.

When we write memoir, we make something that is otherwise in flux concrete – this can be good and bad, good in that you might become a master of your story, and bad perhaps in that it sets it in stone and it becomes a reality, rather than something that was fleeting or forgotten. What are your views on this?

That’s certainly true, and to quote David Copperfield again, that element of being ‘the hero of my own life” was very tempting. I am an extroverted introvert, aren’t a lot of writers? Many people only know the surface, which is outgoing and sociable. I’m actually very private and quite a self-reliant, if daydreamy type of person. There have been various small misinterpretations in some reviews of the book which have led me to think that either I didn’t express myself coherently or the reviewer didn’t read closely enough. And that account is what anyone reading the review will believe me to have written in the book, which irks me somewhat. And it also gets set in stone. “That is not what I meant, at all.” But also the book is out of a writer’s control once it gets published, which is something you just have to accept. And of course I could not have written a thing, and it would indeed have all been forgotten, probably. But I’m relieved that I did.