Output details

This is Not About Me

This is Not About Me and All Made Up were originally intended as just one book, but became two. How children become adults is terrifying and apparently personal territory: the backbone of both books is to stress that it’s not. Childhood is a shared territory - being a child is a land in itself.

Autobiography/memoir tends to be reductive: the author wanted an unconcealed narrative (actual life events which admit their origin), while reconstructing dialogue, dreams and the visual and textural detail of poetry and novels, which strike her as closer to how people think. Rendition of individual consciousness is not ‘style’: it is substance.

Childrearing and the role of memory and experience are crucial to both. How women emerge culturally (Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Alan Warner are more often cited as canonical than Jessie Kesson or Naomi Mitchison); the pre-sexual lives of women, female as norm and not the exotic/marginal and how women respond to class expectations are still classified as additional to ‘seminal’ (sic) Scottish literature in particular. Childhood experience, using the author's own as a trigger for the wider context of the reader bringing theirs into the book too, was its main aim.

Narrated photographs, lies and silences, causal cruelty, omission, smallness and isolation are its territory - the psyche under construction. The point of view changes continually as the child, literally, grows. Together, the author hoped the books would create a picture of how we pull together the often random or unintended things that make us who we are, and what scope the individual has to choose who to be within that context. Parts of This is Not About Me were written during a Robert Louis Stevenson Residency at Hotel Chevillon, France.