This was one of the books I read during my one-text-per-day period and didn’t finish, but I loved it so much I took the time to finish it anyway, later on. This book is partially the text of Vita Sackville-West’s autobiography, which she seems to have never shared with anyone before she died, partially her son Nigel’s narration of his parents’ lives, via his own memories but primarily through their diaries and letters, and partially extended quotes from those same diaries and letters.
I first heard of VSW through Virginia Woolf, as I expect many people do. I knew she was the subject of Orlando, I knew they had exchanged what I would call love letters, I thought VSW was a lesbian and Harold Nicolson was gay and they were each other’s beards/consensually-non-monogamous. I knew VSW had an alter ego named Julian, who took her lovers out in public. I didn’t know that VSW and HN had a deep love between them as well, that they really were primary partners, not just a marriage out of social expectation. Yet they still also had their own separate bedrooms, and lived apart for long stretches of time. Yet it also clearly pained them to be separated. It seems contradictory, but it seems to have worked.
( VSW and VW are part of my own queer literacy story (see post about Queer Literacies by Mark McBeth). I also had a lot of envy I had to work through while reading, since VSW was able to just cavort around Europe with her girlfriend for months at a time while her mother and husband sent her money. Must be nice. )
Quotes I Marked
(p.3) “Of course I have no right whatsoever to write down the truth about my life, involving as it naturally does the lives of so many other people, but I do so urged by a necessity of truth-telling, because there is no living soul who knows the complete truth….Having written it down I shall be able to trust no one to read it” [then she basically says except for Harold, although I do not think she ever gave it to him? At the same time, Nigel says he is fairly sure his mother meant for him to find it after she died.] I think there is no better way of putting the dilemma of the memoirist than this. There is really no fully ethical way to do it, but you are compelled to do it anyway. I think The Argonauts really highlights this too, and Are You My Mother? Both books include talking about how the author shared drafts with a loved one, who was varying levels of uncomfortable with it. But how can you tell someone you love not to do something that their career is based around? There’s so much pressure — probably external, but certainly internal — to press down your feelings.
(p.4) “I realize that this confession, autobiography, whatever I may call it, must necessarily have for its outstanding fault a lack of all proportion. I have got to trust to a very uncertain memory, and whereas the present bulks enormous, the past is misty.”’
In all the memoirs I’ve been reading, it always stands out to me when the author writes about the fact that they are writing it and their reflections on that position/act. And you always have to press on through your self-consciousness, or else the book never happens. I wonder what the memoirs look like where the person failed to move past that crisis/conundrum, so they never finished/shared.
I think this way is the most ethical way to do it— write it, and keep it secret until you and most of the relevant people are dead. I don’t feel comfortable saying everyone SHOULD do it this way, because I think memoirs are super important and enjoyable and I want to read them! And people can enjoy and benefit from them, especially queer memoirs, now! I think a lot of young non-binary people will hold on to Jacob Tobia’s book like a liferaft. But that’s another example of an author whose loved ones (in this case, their parents) weren’t totally thrilled by their portrayal, although Tobia writes about this exact concern with a lot of love for them.
Comedian Bo Burnham talks about how a lot of the stories he tells in his comedy are made up, because his family and friends never chose to be loved ones with a comedian, so it doesn’t feel right to him to have people laugh at stories that are theirs, too.
I don’t think there’s a good answer here.
I’m glad this book exists. I’m glad LGBTQ memoirs exist.