Blake Morrison Spills the Beans (SA/2026)
(Photo of Morrison by Charles Moriarty)
The poet and author Blake Morrison is perhaps best known for three works of memoir: And When Did You Last See Your Father? (1993); Things My Mother Never Told Me (2002); and Two Sisters (2023).
To be honest, I've not read any of the above and as I have an instinctive aversion to Morrison - even though he is a great champion of Lawrence, particularly Sons and Lovers [1] - I don't suppose I ever will.
I have, however, ordered a copy of his new book published by Borough Press: On Memoir: An A-Z of Life Writing (2026), as this genre of writing is of increasing interest to me, even whilst it's one I remain somewhat suspicious of and hostile to.
And, funnily enough - if a recent essay in The Guardian is anything to go by - Morrison himself has a few doubts himself about memoir writing in the age of Substack and digital self-publishing:
"What was once a geriatric, self-satisfied genre (politicians, generals and film stars looking back fondly on long careers) is now open to anyone with a story to tell - 'nobody memoirs', the American journalist Lorraine Adams has called them." [2]
Still, whether written by nobody or somebody, candour is the key to memoir writing; "no matter how fraught the consequences". In a post-Maggie Nelson universe, it doesn't pay to be shy and, as Morrison goes on to note, shocking revelation has long been "an integral part of memoir [because] sometimes the facts are shocking".
To be honest, I'm not sure I like such explicit (often brutal and ugly) openness. I do think an author can overshare and that there is such a thing even in confessional writing as too much information. I would like to know, as a reader, how a writer feels about the death of a parent; I probably don't need to know they recall masturbating in the bath on the day it happened.
Whether "the divulgence is sad-fishing on Facebook, curated self-glorification on Instagram or out-there revelation in a memoir", I'm afraid that I'm one of those readers who feels irritated and affronted by exhibitionist authors who figuratively spill the beans whilst literally inviting us to watch them jerk off.
As Morrison acknowledges, it's not essential for writers to reveal all; they should be able to write "on their own terms and in control of what's committed to print". It's often a mixture of laziness and narcissism that causes a writer to indulge in bean spilling and oversharing. Even in the age of social media, discretion can still be a virtue.
But, on the other hand, says Morrison, discretion is not such a virtue when it becomes a form of evasion driven by dishonesty or fear of how others will react:
"There's no point in telling a personal story if you censor yourself and hold back too much. Be brave [...] it's your version of events and if people close to you object, never mind - let them write their own memoir." [3]
Having said that, like the exercising of discretion, the expression of candour requires technique: "It needs compression, structure, the right tone of voice. The task is to set down what happened, not parade extremes of feeling."
In fact, I would go further than that and say the task is to reimagine what happened, not just record like a machine; to fictionalise and transform life into art. Ultimately, the best form of memoir is called a novel. But writing a novel is difficult, whereas - as we have noted - nobody and anybody can write a memoir.
Clearly, Morrison and I disagree on this point:
"Truth-telling is the measure of memoir, and it's not the same as autofiction. Readers will allow an author wriggle room, for comic exaggeration, say, but where there's knowing fabrication they'll feel cheated, even outraged."
To which one can only ask this Easter weekend: What is truth? And repeat: memoir that doesn't become autofiction is merely poor writing - or what Deleuze describes as dead writing [4].
Morrison says that readers want to be able to trust writers. But here he forgets his Lawrence, who sagely advised us to trust the tale, not the teller and reminded his readers that art speech is essentially a form of telling lies, but that, paradoxically, "out of a pattern of lies art weaves the truth" [5].
But it's not the kind of truth that most people want to hear: it's the truth that Oscar Wilde declared to be anything other than pure and simple [6] and which Nietzsche described as a convenient fiction or a forgotten lie [7].
Finally, what of the argument that readers want more than blogs posts or fragments and snippets of text on Substack; that when the story is interesting and the writer is good, then they are justified in demanding a full-length (professionally published) memoir and that ultimately only such will serve and satisfy ...
Obviously, I don't agree with that. I think the best way to illuminate a life is in a series of lightning flashes; thus I privilege the glimpse over the detailed portrait [8].
But Morrison defends the latter against flashy short-form writing:
"For myself [...] I think published memoirs have plenty to offer that social platforms can't, not least the rewards of a full-length story with a narrative arc, a set of characters, and an approach that doesn't depend on sensational self-exposure, allowing room for reversals, surprises, digressions, complications and a tussle between adversity and reprieve. At their best, memoirs develop with a subtlety unavailable in a short extract [...]"
Morrison concedes that published full-length memoirs can - "when the author is a bumptious blabber or a catastrophiser" - be "as much a turn-off as online snippets". But, he says in conclusion, "where the self-disclosure is nuanced and the writing compelling" nothing beats a book (how very arborescent, as Deleuze would say).
But then he would say that, wouldn't he?
Some might see this as a hard-working and highly respected professonal author defending the traditional art and craft of writing, but one can't help interpreting also as a form of gatekeeping; i.e., safeguarding the elite world of serious literature and those who belong to such - editors, agents, critics and publishers - from the barbarian content creators and bloggers such as myself who are not looking to turn memory into memoir and memoir into money ...
Notes
[1] See Blake Morrison, 'Sons and Lovers: a century on', in The Guardian (25 May 2013): click here.
[2] Blake Morrison, '"Enough of this me me me": Blake Morrison on memoir in the age of oversharing', The Guardian (4 April 2026): click here.
All quotes that follow in this post are from Morrison writing in this article.
[3] Interestingly, Morrison goes on to write: "Readers are no less sensitive than they ever were, just sensitive about different things [...] Push it too far and there might be a social media storm and public backlash. [...] Writers can't afford to ignore the moral climate of the times. But they don't have to kowtow."
Again, I take a rather more aggressive line than Morrison. For me, it's not just a question of not being subservient; a writer worth their salt should stand against public opinion and challenge (transgress) the moral climate of their age (move beyond good and evil, as Nietzsche would say).
[4] For Deleuze, writing is not as an attempt to impose a coherent and conventional linguistic form on lived experience. Above all, Deleuze wishes to stress that literature should not become a form of personal overcoding, which is why any form of writing that is exclusively reliant upon the recounting of childhood memories, foreign holidays, lost loves, or sexual fantasies, is not only bad writing, but dead writing. Literature, he says, can die from an excess of truth-telling, just as it does from an overdose of reality.
See Deleuze's essay 'Literature and Life', in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael E. Greco (Verso, 1998). And see the post 'A Deleuzean Approach to Literature' (30 Aug 2013): click here.
[5] See D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 14.
[6] Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). It can be found in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (HarperCollins, 2003).
[7] See Nietzsche; On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1873). This essay can be found in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870's, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Humanities Press International, 1990), pp. 77-97.
[8] See the post 'I Shall Speak of Geist, of Flame, and of Glimpses' (29 Sept 2021): click here.
