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Writing a memoir is a bumpy travel through time
Whatever the writer’s intention with a memoir, the process of recording the events of one’s life is also a process of making sense of that life.
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Writing a memoir is a form of mental time travel which the author must bridge, says the writer.
PHOTO: PEXELS
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I take a walk in the grounds of my condominium each evening, and the track leads me past the tennis courts. Immediately, the sound of the thud of tennis balls on rackets throws me back into childhood, to a school classroom with windows thrown open to an English summer, and that same sound from the court below.
Later, as I enter my home, I am faced by a shelf of photographs, of children I no longer recognise, a partner and parents long gone from this earth, myself in younger incarnations and, more alarmingly, a five-year-old me. Who are these people? Who am I? Everyone, including myself, appears as a stranger; a stranger once intimately known.
