SO – WHAT’S A MEMOIR?

Back in January I found out about an upcoming competition.  With regular life in suspension and a bit of time on my hands I thought – “Give it a go.  Why not?  Nothing to lose.”  One was required to write a memoir – couple of thousand words and a cash prize.  Beyond the address for submission there were no more details.

But what exactly is a memoir?  As a keen member of a local camera club, I’ve had photographs disqualified as “out of category” or “didn’t meet the brief”.  I didn’t fancy putting time and effort into a couple of thousand words to have them peremptorily discarded in such a cavalier fashion.  Obviously, memory is involved.  Is it just autobiography or is there some twist I’m not aware of?  Bit of research seemed to be in order.

The first dictionary I consulted (fairly simple; from my schooldays) told me it was “an autobiography; a reminder”.  I had a sneaking feeling that for this writing competition there was a bit more to it than that.  So, off to my great big two volume Shorter Oxford to discover that this word has been in use for centuries. Way back then, half a millennia ago, it simply meant “a note; a memorandum; a record – often an official one”.

A couple of hundred years later it had morphed into something much closer in meaning to our twenty first century perception – “a record of events or history from personal knowledge or from special sources of information”.  All connected to memory and autobiography but with a bit of a twist as well in that interviewing then writing an account of someone else’s memories seemed to be in order too.  Right then though I was more concerned with my own personal recollections of my own life.

My very earliest memory is of a big wooden table in the middle of a dim room.  I was sitting in my highchair at one end of the table; to my left, a door standing ajar; a window next to it and beyond the verandah the gentle slope of a sunlit, golden hillside.  I was aware of the rest of the house to my right, behind me and away across the table in the far wall, there was another window with, next to it, in the corner a wood stove, shrouded in shadow.  However, my attention was caught by movement outside on the hillside.  It was a rabbit or more probably a hare, lolloping across; stopping to nibble or look around before continuing its leisurely progress.  The Easter Bunny!  I was filled with immense excitement.

Now, so many, many decades later, I have no idea whether that was my own idea or whether my parents had suggested it.  I was four months past my second birthday; the memory and the magic of it still clear and vivid.

My memories of a happy childhood are not at all a story continuing through the years but a series of pictures, many pictures randomly stamped on a blank canvas, like vignetted photos: crystal clear but with blurred edges.  The competition?  The time on my hands somehow evaporated.  Life last January has also become a blur.

 © Mary McDee 2025

Feature Photo: Wilderness Tamed for Tourists © Alison McDonald 2017