As Margaret Atwood once said, we are all endlessly fascinated by the lives of others, even by the mundane details of a very ordinary life. We love to compare our own circumstances with those of people we read about, but it takes an artist to make the ordinary both exceptional and memorable. It surely goes without saying that much of what we call ‘fiction’ is often fact-based, drawn from the author’s own life experience, but transformed by writerly skill: by poetic license and by the author’s imagination and command of language. A common theme in many of these memoirs is the personal cost of pursuing a frustrated dream, or battling adversity, whether imposed from without by circumstance or brought on by the naivete or ignorance of the author, and once obstacles are overcome, triumph replaces frustration. As readers of memoir, we share both the pain and the joy described, and learn more about the human condition in the process. We are each, memoir makes clear, the product of what we have been, seen, and done.
In view of the continuing popularity of memoir, I am going to use the next four issues of Story Quilt to record instalments of my own childhood in the form of a narrative, or story, in a memoir of the years before my family emigrated to Canada in 1963, an evocation of a time now long gone and of places now changed beyond recognition. Mine was an essentially happy childhood, lived thousands of miles from my birthplace. The title of this four-part sequence, My Storied Childhood, is derived in part from my conviction that we live largely by stories. We are a narrative species. We tell stories to our children and to one another, we keep diaries, gossip and tell jokes in the form of stories, we watch stories unfold on the screen, in soap opera and serious drama alike, and we follow stories in the news, in the novels we buy and borrow from the library, and we even tell stories when we give details of a troubling medical condition to the family doctor or provide evidence as witnesses to police when required. Meteorologists, astronomers, geologists and professional historians all tell stories of what happened, when, where, and how, and sometimes even why. Story Quilt’s title says it all for its eager readers.
The other reason why I call ‘storied’ the pieces that will follow in the months to come is due to a comment made by my late wife Sheila, a storyteller and English teacher like me. She once used the phrase ‘your storied childhood,’ to me. This is often meant pejoratively, but she intended it half-seriously, referring to my notorious tendency to romanticize the past, rendering historical events as fabled or even legendary, even with respect to ordinary events recounted. She admitted at the time that my life abroad had seemed enviable, and considered her own childhood dull and insular by comparison. At the time I attempted to reassure her by quoting Robert Browning’s famous couplet: Grow old along with me; the best is yet to be. We were to share many stories together, but these do not belong in my account of childhood, as we had not yet met.
I hope readers will find these stories interesting and an incentive to search for more of the same. If you let it, a good memoir provides the reader not only with free armchair time travel, as there are no line-ups at a non-existent air terminal, nor any fares to pay, nor any fellow-passengers to jostle with for elbow room in flight, and in return, the reader has an opportunity to read about and develop empathetic human understanding of all the people he gets to meet on his trip, their characteristics, their circumstances, and perhaps their friends and families as well. Some of these might live on in the reader’s memory for a long time to come. After nearly seventy years, I am still good friends with Christopher Robin, Pooh Bear and Piglet, all of whom have real-life prototypes, and I have introduced my children and grandchildren to them. In fact, I met the last two where they now live, behind glass at the New York City Main Library, several years ago, a bit worn by time, but bearing up well (pun intended) under all the public scrutiny…
