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My Animal Life

My Animal Life is a literary memoir, a potentially inbred genre. Research challenges started with the wish to write, for a primary audience of other writers and would-be writers, a frank account of the challenges in sustaining a lifetime career as a novelist. But seeking an original form and wider relevance, specific research questions many people ask arose: how do we forgive ourselves for our mistakes? How do we forgive our parents? Do we ever, really, change class? Can ‘soul’ still have a meaning, for an educated person who loves science? How do modern women reconcile mind and body? As the title indicates, perspectives from evolutionary biology are used, where human beings are animals sharing many behaviours with non-human species. In the chapter analysing the literary world, how reputations are made and unmade, and how literary cabals are formed, are all seen as part of a quasi biological struggle for survival. In this world of competing ‘memes’, analogous to the reproductive world’s competing genes, critics and journalists have their own survival at stake as well as that of the writer. The memoir inspired a commission to write and perform an autobiographical piece at the South Bank (November 2010) alongside Caryl Phillips, also broadcast on Radio 4.