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Guest Editors EMMA TENNANT and HILARY BAILEY* introduce their pick of autobiographical poetry and prose IT took me 24 years as a writer to find the courage to confront my own life, its follies and happinesses and unthinking cruelty. I’d known, ever since 1973 when I entered the ‘inner space’ created by J G Ballard (a sort of gothic urban nightmare, where it seemed, at that time, that the best expression of truth about the way we live now might be found) that I was, of course, really writing about myself all along. I had donned a moustache and whiskers; later I assumed the cloak of feminist magic realism with The Bad Sister and its successors, before going on, with The House of Hospitalities and Wedding of Cousins to a sequence of novels (this was as far as I got) vaguely based on my family. My breakthrough into frank autobiography came in 1997 with the writing of Strangers: A Family Romance, and after that with Burnt Diaries, an autobiographical account of running a literary magazine in Notting Hill in the 1970s, which included a portrait of the poet Ted Hughes. I was attacked, both for Girlitude and Burnt Diaries; but I’d do it again any day. And I came to understand that telling the truth - or getting as near to it as possible - is, of course, the most important element in autobiography. However unpleasant, tell it how it happened; and the more detail the better. Sweeping statements take away the immediacy. Ducking the truth is detectable: more so than you think. * Emma Tennant was hospitalised with a serious eye condition while completing her selection. Her colleague, Hilary Bailey, an experienced teacher of autobiography, kindly stepped in at very short notice to help her draft the introduction. For the complete essay, and for Emma's full selection of autobiographical poetry and prose, read issue 12 • Subscribe! |
 Read a poem chosen by Emma Tennant: Classical concert by Penny Hope  |
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For more on EMMA TENNANT, go to www.canongate.net |
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