Writing the Story of Your Life, by Carmel Bird

Carmel Bird is an Australian writer of novels, short stories and essays. She has written books on the art of writing, and has edited anthologies of essays and stories. In 2016, she was awarded the Patrick White Literary Award.     

– Wikipedia.

This book, written in 2010, I only recently discovered. Glad I did! I’d been flirting with the idea of a memoir for years, always deciding against. But Carmel writes beautifully, and we have a long history….

We knew each other as children, and again in our forties. 

I was born in 1939, she in 1940. We grew up in Launceston, Tasmania, in the same neighbourhood. We didn’t play together often – her place was around the corner and up a hill from mine, a longish walk for a youngster. But our families were acquainted. We remember attending each other’s birthday parties when we were in primary school.  

We both had elocution lessons, and recited (other people’s) poems in The Competitions – an annual State-wide eisteddfod for music and elocution students. We were at the same school awhile too, in different classes. Then, still in our teens, circumstances took us on separate journeys, geographical and otherwise. 

We met again in eighties Melbourne, as featured writers at Montsalvat Poetry Festival, and got to know each other all over again. We almost became the close friends we weren’t as kids. But, circumstances…. We became geographically distanced once more. Now we have only slight awareness of what the other is up to – both still engaged in literary life, but in different arenas; with rare contact, friendly-but-brief.

Nevertheless, the shared childhood place and experiences, and our similar feelings about them, creates deep understanding. We are both – as she calls herself in the book – expatriates, yearning for the home we remember. (We've both occasionally revisited.) 

Though each chooses not to live there now, the yearning is real. Whenever anything's on TV about Tasmania, I’m glued to the screen. This book, full of Carmel’s childhood recollections, from her journals, awakens and satisfies that yearning. 

She offers fascinating insights about memoir, related to both fact and fiction. She makes memoir writing sound like the most seductive of pleasures! The enticing exercises, though, I didn’t (yet) do. I told myself I was reading for the lovely writing and lovely reminiscences. Yet even before I finished, I began a new memoir I know I’ll complete – not about childhood, but a later experience I’ve been blocked from writing. This book freed me.

Note: This is a longer, more detailed and personal version of my Goodreads and Amazon review.

I'm sharing this with Poets and Storytellers United at Friday Writings #30:  Beloved Books, in which I invite people to write something inspired by one of their favourite books. This part review, part memoir celebrates a new favourite of my own – and the memoir it helped free me to write is the story about prison poetry workshops which I have recently been sharing, bit by bit, with P&SU.