Memoir series: finding a way through

Recently I visited Little Acorns bookshop in Derry. It’s in a brand-new location, but a wonderful old building – a tall Georgian house on Great James Street, one of Derry’s hilly streets. The Derry bookstore owner, Jenni Doherty is a passionate bookseller and it is always a pleasure to talk about books with her. As the warm autumn sun lit the red brick of the shop’s front, Jenni was celebrating the fact that Irish Book Week, (14 – 21 October 2023) champions Irish authors and illustrators, publishers, and Irish interest books, as well as the many brilliant bookshops that sell them.

A first

On our way back up Shipquay Street, I remembered that it was on this street that I first went into a bookshop. It was the APCK Bookshop and while I tried to place what building it would have been in, I discovered it had been demolished in 1980 to make way for a shopping centre. I remember the first books I ever bought there – with saved pocket money, birthday or communion money, or bought for me as a present from my father.

One was a poetry book by the American poet Rod Mc Keun and I loved it since he illustrated his poems with photographs. It was a very 70s book with a kind of American hippy feel to it – photos of McKeun lying on Californian beaches, autumn leaves and rivers – and it was a book that took me miles from the Troubles in Derry. I see that he is now the best-selling poet ever in the US and mocked for his accessibility. Dick Cavett quipped that he was, ‘the most understood poet in America.’ But for me, at age 12 or 13, the book was a revelation and I began to make my own poetry books with either my own or others’ poems, alongside images chosen from the colour supplements of my father’s Sunday newspapers.

I also remember buying a copy of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man, long before I could read or understand it, just because I already knew it was an important book. Intriguingly, I find that the APCK (The Association for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge) was originally founded in Dublin in October 1792, in response to this same book’s publication and the French Revolution. The APCK shop in Belfast now is a distinctly Christian bookshop, but my memory of the Derry shop was of a simply good bookshop that stocked a whole range of Penguin Books and gave me my first taste of Russian and American literature. Every trip to the city meant a visit there and returning home with a brand new book, smelling its pages before reading.

A bookseller’s list

When I grew up, the best job I ever had was as a bookseller. I did it twice: in Penguin Books, Camden, before I’d settled on a career and then at the Bookshop at Queens in Belfast when on a sabbatical from teaching. In Camden, I learned of the ‘Mother List’ of books held in a bookseller’s head – the key titles that you would want to have in any section – before there were databases or the internet.

In Queens, while I looked after fiction, poetry and drama at times, I was mainly a children’s bookseller and, in this role, you have the privilege of helping little ones from babies up to young adults to find the right books. At the time, I tried to encourage Radio Ulster to include reviews of children’s books on book programmes but was told that children weren’t their audience. However, it is often adults who buy the books and anything that helps them do that is worthwhile.

Like many writers I’ve dreamed of having my own bookshop. I still have a great name for it but that’s as far as it goes. I really want to visit those owned by Ann Patchett and Louise Erdrich in the US, two of my favourite writers – Patchett’s is Parnassus Books in Nashville and Erdrich’s Birchbark Books in Minneapolis.

Stepping stones

In memoir writing, we often look for a throughline – a theme or thread that ties disparate stories of our lives together. ‘Bookshops I have loved’ would definitely be one of mine. You can do this with anything that provides stepping stones through your life, something that has been a constant and will take you through its stages. Memoirs use illnesses, houses, professions, animals, lovers – all kinds of things to do this.

Sometimes in teaching, it is amazing to find the throughline reveal itself to a writer who has been unaware that that is what it will be, unconscious of something that appears in successive pieces and suggests itself as a theme.

Sometimes I ask students to draw the river of their life and represent its twists and turns and obstacles and see what might flow through it and from this create notional chapter headings. What might the throughline of your life be? Choose one and have a go at sketching the different ways you might write of it.

Read more

Memoir: postcards from the end of summer

Memoirs: Write here, write now