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Thanks to Mary Lou, who sent me Melvyn Bragg’s novel ‘Remember Me’, I have been reassessing the overlap between Memoir and novel.  Bragg, who is a household name in England but less well known here, has given us a portrait of a marriage in which he freely moves into the consciousness of both the lovers, of their parents, and of their friends, which of course breaks all the so-called rules of what Memoir is supposed to do.

After all, in memoir as in life one can only guess at the inner thoughts of others, and speculation is sometimes the best one can manage at times about even one’s own thoughts.  So to see Bragg assert, so convincingly, that such a person felt this on such a day and that his counterpart felt that, well, it feels almost miraculous.

Bragg has been quite clear in various interviews that he was drawing from his own life directly at times, so that he could come to understanding in a new way.

The danger, as I’m sure you can see, is that any novel has to do several things to  make its claim to be a novel.  It has to have a structure that is recognizable; it has to have a sense of closure that is satisfying to the reading public.  It has to be shaped in ways that Memoir can avoid, and it has to be told in certain ways.  And it has to be more definite than Memoir.  This can lead us to tricky ground, since any writer, in the pursuit of a viable story, will feel free to write what works rather than what was.  Novels can lead to contrivances such that they soothe the writer (and the reader) rather than telling the truth.

Only the finest of novelists can tell a fictional tale and still reach the essentials - and at that point it doesn’t matter that we have a novel, because we know we’re in the hands of a Magician.  Bragg is just such a magician.