Adelaide Writers’ Week director Laura Kroetsch’s 2018 program reflects the huge appetite for memoir and autobiography

FICTION is still king, but life writing will be a significant presence on the program of Adelaide Writers’ Week next year.

Jenny Valentish’s Woman of Substances is a memoir of her own traumatic and troubled history.

IN Richard Flanagan’s new novel First Person, he describes an exchange between his alter-ego, Kif, and a young New York writer, who declares that the novel “as a mode of narrative” is dead. Autobiography was what everyone was writing now, she says. “Novels disempower reality,” adds her companion.

“Everyone” might be a bit of a stretch, but it’s true that life writing is enjoying unprecedented popularity, as the program for next year’s Adelaide Writers’ Week attests. Memoir and autobiography will be much discussed when writers and readers gather in the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden in early March.

Flanagan’s novel is written as a memoir, and fictionalises key autobiographical details of his own life. It is, in part, a critique of the current state of publishing and our obsession with “the first person”, a theme he warms to in person. “I was interested to use the form of a memoir, because literary memoir, particularly in America, is not just the fashion but it’s become a dogma because it’s argued that reality has outstripped fiction and therefore fiction has no place in literature,” he said ahead of his visit to Adelaide for an out-of-season Adelaide Writers’ Week event earlier this month. “But it’s not so,” he adds. “It is that untruth has outstripped truth. And I believe that novels represent a profound and fundamental and necessary form of truth.”

Sarah Krasnostein’s biography The Trauma Cleaner tells a woman who brings order to the dead and the living through empathy and kindness.

Laura Kroetsch, director of Adelaide Writers’ Week, makes no apology for the strong presence of life writing in her program, but disagrees that literary memoir has displaced the novel. Fiction continues to hold pride of place in her festival, she says “and if you add up the books, there are more novels than books of nonfiction”. “And I think that’s important, because that’s what festivals are supposed to do,” she says.

International novelists of the calibre of Booker Prize winner Alan Hollinghurst will be here from the UK with his new book The Sparsholt Affair, as will American writer Barbara Kingsolver, perhaps best known for The Poisonwood Bible, and lesser known but much admired authors Rachel Khong (Goodbye Vitamin, US), Sarah Winman (Tin Man, UK), and Karachi- born but now London resident and author of seven novels Kamila Shamsie, with Home Fire.

Crime writers include Canadian superstar Louise Penny with Glass Houses, and, from the American south, Thomas Mullen, author Darktown, and Michael Farris Smith, with Desperation Road. Homegrown novelists include Miles Franklin Award winners Kim Scott (twice), Sofie Laguna and Michelle de Kretser, crime writer Anna George, Robert Drewe, Ashley Hay, Robert Dessaix, and beloved children’s authors Mem Fox and Jackie French.

Kroetsch has no argument with Flanagan’s opinion about the novel’s ability to reflect profound truths. “But in some ways I do think that old adage is true, that truth is stranger than fiction,” she says. “And reading these books is about how we negotiate our lives. I think we do that with fiction and nonfiction, but with some of these stories, when they are dealing with real life experiences, or science, or their own sometimes very funny families, I think there’s a kind of integrity to allowing those stories to be true and owning them, especially since so many young writers are caught in that trap of fictionalising their own lives to create their first novels.”

Poet Patricia Lockwood gives a tender account of growing up with her eccentric Elvis-impersonating clergyman father in Priestdaddy.

American writer Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich’s The Fact of a Body: A Murder and A Memoir, for example, wouldn’t work as a novel, says Kroestch. Kate Cole-Adams uses investigative journalism, history and her own experience to explore the medical mystery of what it’s like to go under in Anaesthesia: The Gift of Oblivion. Sarah Krasnostein’s The Trauma Cleaner is a remarkable biography of a woman who brings order to the dead and the living in a moving book about empathy and kindness. Jenny Valentish interweaves research into what turned out to be scant data on addiction among women with a memoir of her own deeply traumatic and troubled history in Women of Substances. American poet Patricia Lockwood has written a funny and tender account of growing up with her eccentric father, a clergyman and Elvis impersonator, among many other attributes, in Priestdaddy.

Former Middle East correspondent for The Australian John Lyons will talk about his memoir of family life and professional life in a foreign posting in Balcony Over Jerusalem. And the ABC’s hugely popular broadcaster Richard Fidler will join his collaborator Kari Gislason to talk about their book Saga Land, part history of the Icelandic sagas and part-memoir of their visit there and Gislason’s fractured childhood in the land of a father who never publicly acknowledged him.

These, and others, as well as those still-to-be announced, are likely to be popular guests come March.

“Memoir and biography always pull big crowds,” says Kroetsch. “People are really interested in stories of real people’s lives, be it biography or memoir. Because I do think people are looking at ways to make sense of the world and there is something about the fact that it is real.” ●

Adelaide Writers’ Week, Saturday March 3 to Thursday March 8, 2018.