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 tenth interview is with Richard Beard whose memoir The Day That Went Missing is an extraordinary account of the tragic death of his brother as a child and its effect on his family. I return to this memoir again and again in my teaching as it has such a satisfying structure, which echoes the emotional journey Richard goes on in trying to get to the bottom of a mystery exacerbated by years of denial. It is a powerful reading experience.

Richard Beard’s six novels include Lazarus is Dead, Dry Bones and Damascus, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His novel Acts of the Assassins was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, and he is the author of five works of narrative non-fiction. His memoir The Day That Went Missing won the 2018 PEN Ackerley Award for literary autobiography and in the US was a National Book Critics Circle finalist. His latest memoir/polemic is Sad Little Men.

When did you realise that you had to write the Day That Went Missing?

I never felt I had to write it, but I had a sense that it might be important for me personally as well as a subject for a memoir because I had written about a drowning in one of my novels, Lazarus is Dead. Lazarus’s brother drowns in Lake Galilee – and what I wrote was pretty much my exact memory of what had happened when my brother drowned, and I assumed my family would read it and then we would start to have a conversation about this thing we had never talked about. What I discovered first of all was that my family don’t read my books, but then when my older brother did read it he had no connection to it and had no idea that this was essentially something that was true but in fictional form. He said he didn’t even know I had been in the water with my other brother when he had died. This central memory for me had been completely wiped out by everyone else. I thought this is really strange. Not only do we not talk about it, but we also don’t remember the same thing, so no one knows what happened. Therefore there is something to be uncovered here. What did actually happen? This is when I realised I needed to do this. It isn’t just me having a writing project; my family needs to address it.

So you used your writing as a way of communicating something that was easier to do in story form?

No, I think it’s more that when you write, the writing becomes central to your life. This event was powerful in my sense of self and therefore I thought it would be powerful in a novel, but somehow it transcended that – from being not simply something to be used in a novel, to give emotional charge to what otherwise is made up, but the reality of it became more important. There was a real-life implication that was worth following through.

What was the experience like writing it as memoir, compared to fiction?

In fiction there is a dramatic event which fits into a series of dramatic events which makes a novel. In a memoir there is a dramatic event, and then in real life there is the question: ‘and?’ What happened. How did this come about? It’s more like a picture, a narrative painting. What happened before, what happened afterwards? I had a moment, a memory of a drowning when I was in the water with my brother, and I was asking: how did we get here? That’s when I realised I had no idea what had happened before and after the event, and I didn’t even know what date it had happened on. It occurred to me that this level of denial is clearly a blanket over the whole experience.

The denial involved your family. Did you need to ask their permission to revisit the past in this way?

I felt it was my story in that I was in the water with my brother when he drowned, and so I was more intimately connected with his death. I realised when I started talking to my family that that wasn’t how they saw it at all, which was really important to learn. From early on I felt I didn’t need to have permission, but I did want to get them involved. The best way to get a family involved is to talk to them, interview them and make them a part of the story.

So, you felt very firmly that this was your story. Obviously your story merges with other stories but because it was such a dramatic story and had such an effect on your life, you felt you had a right to stand by that story and not feel apologetic about it?

There are two elements to that question. First, yes, I felt at the centre of the story but then I discovered that my brothers were also at the centre of the story, but they were at the centre of their story. But the second part is identifying as a writer. Part of the process of writing a memoir is that at some point the writer has to say I am a writer, I am setting this down on paper and I have a right to do that. I think you need to inhabit that state of being a writer in order to actually write it, as well as inhabit the experience you’re writing about. Memoir works really well when the writer is investigating in the present day as well as going back into the memory, because that identity as the memoir writer is very important to the process.

Do you think that was a process for you, or did you always have the authority to write this because you had already touched on it in your fiction, and you already identified as a writer? Was there a process of preparedness to be able to own that story?

There was an argument made in a review by Stuart Kelly in The Scotsman that you could see in my novels a clear progress towards my memoir, that they were all leading to me gathering the right skills together to tell the story, because as a memoir writer, fiction skills are very useful. But being a writer can also get in the way because one of the things I had to do to find the authoritative voice, which is authentic and true, was to stop being tricky in a fictional way and to stop thinking about structures and frames. I do think that identifying as a writer can get in the way of the authenticity of memoir.

In a way your character needs to break himself down to face the truth, because he circles before he can return to the place where the drowning happened. As a writer did you have to come to a more real and more true part of yourself in order to tell the story?

I think writing this book changed me as a writer as well as a person. The process of finding out about the past was a genuine process of discovery. It wasn’t something that was invented for the purposes of the memoir. I genuinely didn’t know the date that he had died, and I didn’t know his birthday. I had to ask my own mum for the birthday of her dead son! These were things that actually happened so this process of discovery led to a clear denouement to go back to that place and try to relive it, and it was a surprise to me what happened there, so the experience and the writing came together. I don’t think I would have done that without the motivation of the writing, so the two things were completely interlinked. If I hadn’t set off on the project as a writer, I wouldn’t have got to the same conclusion as a human being, and lived the changes that came about because of that. So yes, the two things are connected.

Was it challenging emotionally for you to go through that process? And did you need support?

Yes, it was definitely challenging to write, but the writing itself was a support, because it required ownership. If I had gone through this process of revisiting where the family tragedy happened, not writing about it and not knowing what to do with it, I think it would have been more disturbing. But I knew what I wanted to do with it, which was to make the writing as honest an expression as possible of what was happening, and that was its own support. Almost a written version of therapy. I am going to tell it, and I am going to tell it as honestly as I can. Almost like doing therapy with yourself.

I wonder if you also have that dialogue between the two parts of yourself through the process of writing – the adult you and the child? So you’re reflecting and finding new meaning from events from the past. I know it’s not therapy because it doesn’t involve a second person and it’s more public You’re writing it for yourself but you’re also writing it with the hope it is going to have an audience. But it’s like laying the experience out to look at it in a different light, in the hope that you might be able to get beyond it somehow.  

The presence of the projected reader might be important in this because it forces you to process it. If you didn’t have a projected reader, and you were just putting it into notebooks you might just splurge it, but the fact you have to organise it and make it readable does make you process it in a more comprehensive way.

And you’re not expecting your reader to do the therapeutic work for you. My supervisor, Julia Bell always said that to me when I did my PhD: you need to do the work on yourself, you can’t expect your reader to do it for you.

You have to process it to communicate it to your reader, a really good point.

And when you had this thing that you had created and discovered and brought to light, through the process of talking to your mother and your brothers, how were they with it? Did they move alongside you ?

I don’t think it would ever have got written if I’d tried to travel their journey with them once I’d brought it up. I was quite clear. I had a sit-down interview with all of them and made a point of going to see them. Sitting down with my notebooks and asking questions. What they made of that afterwards, I didn’t let distract me. It was about my ownership of the story. When I had a well-developed draft I passed it to them and said – tell me if you think there’s anything that is not true. If you don’t agree, that’s fine, we can talk about that, but I won’t change it for that reason. But I do want to know if any of it is factually not true. And that was the level of intervention.

Did they come back with anything they thought wasn’t true?

There were things they didn’t like, which was fine, But because of the investigative nature of the memoir a lot of it was backed up with documentation which was what I needed to find the truth itself and so it was quite hard to dispute.

You didn’t take anything out that they didn’t like? You stuck with what you had said?

Yes, and that was something I had learned from writing a biography about someone who was still alive when I wrote it. Some people disputed it, and I said: well that’s what happened and that’s what I thought about it, so I’m keeping it. That’s my prerogative. I’m not saying this is my truth and you can’t dispute it. Rather, I’m saying: this is based on a factual correctness and I do have a right to say this is how I experienced it and everyone has a right to say how they experienced it. They have a right to write their own books if they want to. And if they choose not to do so, that is their choice.

Do you think it helped your family? Even though it was difficult, did you see it as a gift to them?

I think it was a gift. It brought us closer, my mother particularly. The moment I started to ask my mum about this event, and she started talking about it, she realised she loved talking about it, and the fact that it was then out in the open. But when I was writing it I didn’t think I was doing it for the good of my family.

This is such an important message to tell students of memoir who want to write their family history, as so many don’t because they’re afraid of hurting family members. But there’s something in the authority of saying I am a writer and I have a right to write this and these are the facts, that a lot of people find really difficult to do in memoir.

It’s the balance between an obligation to nonfiction – telling the truth – and asserting the right to tell your own story.

How is memoir different from lived experience?

In rare cases, like with Boris Johnson, people are playing a character of themselves rather than themselves, and are so dissociated that that’s how they live, but mostly people live their experience as it happens – it’s raw and direct. But when you are writing memoir, there is a distance.

And in your own memoir you are also a character. If you just had that raw contact with experience, you would miss out on the element of discovery that you want to share with the reader, finding things out. It does help if you are a bit stupider than in real life. You might find things out, but you don’t immediately understand them. This is a way of characterising yourself in memoir.

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

Yes, I think it does because of what we were saying about secrets. It’s hard to make decisions and judgements without having all the information, that’s the case personally, politically and publicly. And because there are connections and parallels between different people’s lives, writing a book or painting a painting or doing any art at all really matters. Omerta is a word that comes up in relation to private schools, but it is true in private lives too; English reticence about being open about our private emotions in particular. When we communicate we realise we have much more to share than we previously thought and that can change the way people approach their daily lives and their relationships, the important things. To get rid of that omerta is important for the writer, but it can then lead the way for readers to do something similar.

Do you think fiction has that same power?

I think it can do. Writing nonfiction has changed my relationship to fiction. I don’t really know about fiction anymore. Having been a true believer I now feel agnostic. I feel a lot of strong fiction is rooted in autobiography and memoir and the further it gets away from that the less power it has. It tends to work for me when I’m reading a book and I think, yes this really happened, this is your story. Maybe that’s a trick fiction writers can pull to make you think it’s their story when actually it’s not. But the direct power of memoir has really made me question fiction.