I was glancing through a magazine the other day – kids, this is something old people do, like Facebook – and found an interesting advertisement for helping you to write your memoirs. For an undisclosed amount, someone else, a professional writer, does it for you. From what I can gather, you simply answer the questions they send you and they turn it into ‘your’ life story. A drawback, I feel, could be that if someone writes your book – a ghostwriter, they call her/him – then it’s not really your work at all. Sure, the finished product – and I use the word product deliberately – would likely be more polished, devoid of typos and grammatically better than I might manage, but isn’t that rather missing the point? Shouldn’t a memoir, an autobiography, actually be written by the person whose life it is, warts and all.
The advertising blurb also suggested that my children would be grateful to know all about my life when I have shuffled off my mortal coil. I can imagine they’d be thrilled to learn about who I slept with, about the times I got hopelessly and disgracefully drunk and that hilarious time when I put dog shit in a book in our local library. I’m sure they would be so proud of me. The trouble with writing a memoir, or paying someone to do it for you, when one’s list of lifetime achievements is so modest, means that if I left out the sex, drugs and rock and roll, there would be nothing left to write about.
My quarter of a century of being one of the worst players in parks football, perhaps? My appearance in the civil service darts championships back in 1983 when I found myself playing against Bob ‘The Limestone Cowboy’ Anderson, who went on to become World Champion (and yes, the result was every bit as embarrassingly one-sided as you might have expected)? Or my one sporting success story: being part of a skittles team that once won the Bristol NALGO front-first competition? I am far from convinced that people would be queuing up to read about any of those minor stories. And no one would be buying a book describing them, even if it was written by a professional and not me.
How do you make a story about a disappointing civil service career of nearly 40 years? Like most civil servants, I only joined because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I had no particular skills nor talent and I was almost entirely bereft of qualifications. I have come to the rather obvious conclusion that people who employ ghostwriters have not got much of a story to tell, so they need someone with the necessary skills to make it look like they have.
I have had a number of false starts on the memoir front and I concluded a long time ago that my story, such as it is, would represent the most boring read imaginable, even to me. So, the get someone else to write your memoirs suggestion has gone in one ear and out of the other. Instead, my musical memoir is progressing at glacial speed and I am not even sure whether In can be bothered with it. Does anyone really need to know the record that seemed to be playing everywhere the evening I … er … became a man, if you know what I mean? Would anyone be interested in the record I played over and over again on my Auntie Gladys’s gramophone when my mum took me to visit her? Who gives a toss what the number one single was on the day I was born? I reckon the answers to all three are no one. But still the work goes on until I get to the point where I either give up on the 60,000+ words I have already written or I self-publish the rubbish I have managed to come up with. Despite everything, I hope it’s the latter.
Either way, my work, whether on this blog or in my non-awaited difficult second book (don’t bother with the first: it’s rubbish), will be just that, mine. I may require the services of a proofreader to correct the typos and to tinker with the mangled grammar, but whether the end product is shit or even worse shit, it won’t be ghosted. I haven’t got much of a story to tell and you will find that out sometime in 2026, if if I live that long. Don’t wait up.
