HEALTH PLUS:Memoirs give us a greater understanding of where we are going, writes MARIE MURRAY
PEOPLE HAVE a fascination with memoirs. Memoirs provide the perfect combination of personal story, historical insight, factual data and descriptive detail. They give access to individual lives and written accounts of them. The reader gets into the actual memory of another person and is given the thoughts that person had as a child.
The reader participates in the ordinary happenings that were important to “that child” growing up and the reflections of the adult looking back on that childhood through adult eyes and the passage of time.
Memoirs provide comparison for those who lived during the same era as a narrator. They provide information and insight for those who did not.
They invite people who were alive at the time to recall their own personal experience and perception of it and, in so doing, to reflect on the changes that time has wrought.
Memoirs invite those who are of a later generation to understand what life was like before them. Accounts of the past provide a context for the present.
While memoirs are of their essence personal, they are not mere nostalgic narcissistic narratives or regressive reminiscences without purpose. Instead, these individually written journeys into the past, these autobiographies, personal chronicles, life stories and journals all provide a unique access to an individual, a time, a place and a way of life that might not otherwise be available to them.
They are often important records of the lived reality and ordinariness of everyday life during a period that no longer exists because it has been replaced with different ways of living.
Memoirs often provide what official archives cannot. They are stories of personal experiences, told by an individual. Yet the personal is often universal and that is why people are interested in memoirs: they tell an individual story that has resonances for everyone in some way.
Social history is recorded by each of us as individuals and collectively in our accounts to each other of our lives and our times. Memoirs of earlier eras are not just interesting records of the nuances of life as previously lived. Often these are times worth recording, contain events worth remembering, a rhythm that has ceased, roles that are defunct, services that are obsolete, practices that no longer exist and social customs, most of which would be incomprehensible to the current generation.
In mid-20th century Ireland, social structures, educational organisations, civil codes, interpersonal interactions, family size and composition, gender roles, sexual mores, child-rearing customs and religious practices were intertwined. How life was lived was predetermined, predictable and reliable.
Most people who grew up in a village, a town or in any relatively small close-knit community, or who grew up in its rural surround, will remember “characters” in their home place. They will remember the grocer, the tailor, the schoolmaster, the postmistress, the sergeant, and the richness of the personalities that made up social life.
People will remember the objects of that time: the tilly lamp, canisters of milk, pictures of the Sacred Heart, bellows, wet batteries and washtubs. Doing homework under the tilly lamp is as alien to the child today, who Googles geography assignments, as the dip pen that was used to execute those homework sessions.
And how many would know what “opening a furrow”, “going to the privy”, visiting “the Big Smoke”, having a turn at the churn or footing a square of turf involved?
Goodnight Ballivor, I'll Sleep in Trimis a childhood memoir told by writer, radio producer and broadcaster John Quinn and typifies what is important in these personal accounts. It is a journey into the author's past in the sleepy midlands village of Ballivor, 60-odd years ago.
It provides insight into a way of life that shaped the Irish psyche today. For a memoir renders permanent a particular part of our culture’s past. It does so in the narrative tradition, the “seanchas”, or storytelling tradition, through which personal histories and cultural identities are formed.
It recognises that if people do not know from whence they came, how they got there and where they are going, they cannot understand where they are now, what they are travelling towards and why. That is the psychological importance of this and many other Irish memoirs.
They insist that we remember ourselves, locate ourselves in time and history, appreciate what was good in a former era, reject what was not and ensure that the future is informed by what precedes it.
- Clinical psychologist Marie Murray is the director of the student services in UCD and an Irish Timeshealth columnist