We’ve now moved on to our second book of the semester, Michael Ondaatje’s Running In The Family, a novel that, at first glance, is about the author’s return to Sri Lanka having lived in Canada for a long period of time. While the book is technically a memoir – it tells a personal story through Ondaatje’s family – it doesn’t quite fit the genre.
When I think of what a memoir is I think biographical, truth, usually about someone or something of importance and retelling. Honestly, they don’t usually interest me. However, this book does not conform to what we expect of a memoir. As we have discussed in class and in the Matthew Bolton essay, we can describe Running In The Family as a “historiographic metafiction” – it finds its basis in truth, using it as a launch pad to explore topics (particularly identity) through imagination and self-reflection.
The one memoir I can remember having read is Wild Swans by Jung Chang, a powerful (it’s one of my favourite books) recount of her grandmother’s mother’s and her own experience in China throughout the 20th century. This book was detailed in providing dates, photos, family trees, maps and articles. The primary concern in Wild Swans was telling the truth of what life was like for these women in China, and broadcasting that to a wider audience. So reading Running In The Family with this expectation in mind was difficult.
Michael Ondaatje was not concerned with telling the truth of his family and their life across Canada and Sri Lanka – this was not his primary concern. As Bolton argued, anyone with an expectation of truth and a representation of Sri Lanka and a responsibility to Ondaatje’s culture are not going to have this fulfilled. Instead, this book is more of an identity finding mission, rather than a fact finding one. But to be disappointed with the lack of truth in this ‘memoir is unfair, as Ondaatje never promised it to be a recount of his family’s life.
Reading Running In The Family has shifted my sense of what a memoir can be. I actually have a more positive view of them. Ondaatje achieves a much more personal goal in his book, as he reconciles his identity in relation to his father and how he feels about their lack of relationship. To me, this is much more interesting that the recount of one person’s story – there is something much more rewarding about it.
But, having said this, I’m starting to think is any memoir actually capable of providing what we expect of it? We expect the truth and a story retold from personal knowledge. Do any memoirs achieve this? One of the first topics we discussed in relation to Running In The Family was this idea of retracing memory, how it is formed and how we tell it. If memoirs are formed from memory, are they really ‘the truth’ as we expect it? Whenever we go back over memories and rework them and form them into stories to tell we change, edit, add a little bit of detail, leave certain parts out. Surely memoirs are guilty of this too? Perhaps not to the extent that Ondaatje inserts himself into his book, but supposedly still to some extent.
It all really depends of what we expect from a memoir. But overall, I’ve had my sense of what a memoir is shifted.