Look back in candour

Lockdown led to a boom in autobiography. Frances Wilson gives you her tips on how to tell the story of your life

- Frances Wilson

If everyone has a book inside them, in most cases it’s a memoir. Time was when only the gilded and the good – celebrities, politicians, aristocrats and entrepreneurs – were considered entitled to share their memories, but the genre has now opened its doors to the general public.

Personally, I am less interested in what St Augustine or Elton John have to reveal than I am in the confessions of the crazy cat lady over the road, who rummages around in the neighbours’ dustbins and delivers bottles of wine to our doorsteps. Now that’s a memoir I would buy in hardback.

Last April, as lockdown was kicking in, I ran a course called How to Write a Life Story. Nothing unusual here; I’ve been running memoir, family-history and biography courses for over a decade.

Except that, instead of sitting with ten people round a table, I ran this one via Zoom with 150 people lying on the sofa at home. Two were celebrities, one a politician, and there was a smattering of aristos and entrepreneurs. Everyone’s story was extraordinary because there is, I have learned, no such thing as an ordinary life.