Writing the memoir while living it

Lately, I've been wondering why I love memoirs so much.

Not biographies. Not even autobiographies, most of the time. Memoirs.

The kind that arrive in fragments. A childhood memory. A family story. An afternoon that seemed ordinary until it wasn't. Nothing particularly consequential happening in the larger scheme of history, yet by the last page you feel as though you have travelled a great distance. You have accompanied someone through a life. Someone you never met and never will.

Looking back, I think I was reading memoirs long before I knew the word existed.

One of my favourite books as a 10-12 year old child was a thick collected works volume (knows as a Samagra in Hindi) by Shri Rameshwar Tantia, published by a small press in Varanasi that seems to have disappeared now. My father introduced me to a lot of Indian literature through this press, they specialised in printing collected works of legendary Indian authors in dense typesetting to reduce the overall cost. Will talk about it some other time. This samagra contained what I believe all of his works. I remember reading his account of Indian history, but what stayed with me most was his recollection of life…from growing up in rural Rajasthan before Independence to becoming a freedom fighter and eventually a member of parliament under Nehru. For reasons I couldn't have explained then, I read the story of one man's childhood with the same fascination as the story of an entire nation.

Years later came Orhan Pamuk. First Snow, then Istanbul in quick succession. I remember feeling something close to what Eklavya must have felt towards Dronacharya. Without his knowledge or consent, I had found myself a literary guru. Even today, I wish I could write about my younger self and the Delhi of those years with the same tenderness and precision with which Pamuk wrote about Istanbul.

More recently there has been Ann Patchett's These Precious Days. Have written about it [here]. Currently reading Patti Smith's Just Kids, whose opening chapter is among the more devastatingly beautiful pages I’ve read in recent times. Also started Janet Malcolm's Still Pictures a couple of days back. At first, Malcolm puzzled me. Her memoir pieces seemed to wander off without arriving anywhere. No interconnectedness, no grand insight, even no formal ending. But slowly I've begun to appreciate that quality. Perhaps lives themselves are more like that than we care to admit.

I don't know why memoirs call to me.

Perhaps, second only to science fiction, they are my favourite form because they are both trying to answer the same question from opposite directions. One asks what it means to be human by imagining other worlds. The other asks the same question by looking closely at this one.

Or perhaps it is something simpler.

I've always been interested in the meaning hidden inside a life. Why certain people arrive. Why certain years change us. Why some memories remain luminous while others disappear entirely. Memoirs feel like conversations with people who have spent years asking those same questions.

And maybe there is one more possibility.

Perhaps I love memoirs because, somewhere in the back of my mind, I am already building one.

Not on paper. Not yet.

But in the way I pay attention to a song that arrives at the right moment. A conversation over tea. A hospital waiting room. A walk. A city. A season.

As though life is being lived once, but remembered simultaneously.

As though I am writing the memoir while the story is still happening.