Writing Memoir
Love´s Last Gift by Bebhinn Ramsay, dedicated to Alastair Ramsay.
Writing a memoir began as a therapeutic rather than a literary pursuit for me.
In May of this year, Hachette will publish Love´s Last Gift, a memoir of my experience of the sudden death of my husband Alastair and the consequences of his death. Alastair died five years ago from a rare complication to a common infection, while we were on holidays in San Francisco with our two young sons. I was thirty-one at the time and my world as I knew it collapsed irrevocably. In Love´s Last Gift, I share with the reader a taste of the early, heady days of our love, the life we had in London and the shocking experience of his death in America. I write of my desperate and unsuccessful attempts to find answers and solace, from a Buddhist retreat to taking my two young sons on the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in the North of Spain. I recount how I spent the first year dealing with the realities of life as a single parent and how I was overwhelmed with a feeling of injustice. ‘Alastair should not have died’ was my constant mantra.
Over time, I found a way of changing my thinking about my husband´s death and in doing so, was able to find solace. Love’s Last Gift is my pilgrimage to finding acceptance and peace. Just over a year after Alastair’s death, I set up the Alastair Ramsay Charitable Trust, ARCH, and moved with my two young sons, to Florianópolis, Brazil to oversee the set-up of a child-focussed charity, Child Health Florianópolis, in his honour. Over the following three years, we raised money with friends and family and helped over 200 people in 60 low-income families with sick children to improve their quality of life. In 2011, I received a local award in Brazil for ‘women who make a difference´. I dedicated the award to Alastair and to all the hundreds of women and men who created ARCH and Child Health Florianopolis. All author royalties of Love´s Last Gift go to ARCH. This memoir is therefore a vehicle for raising funds to continue the humanitarian work that was started in Alastair´s honour.
Read more: Love´s Last Gift by Bebhinn Ramsay, dedicated to Alastair Ramsay.
Using Your Senses To Evoke Memoires
I first started writing a novel but struggled to hold it together in any cohesive way. Characters, plots and subplots refused to be pinned down – most especially when I took extended breaks from writing to have my first and then subsequent children. When my brain returned to me several months post-partum, so did the desire to get back writing but I knew, overwhelmed as I was with night feeds, nappies and pureed foods, I was incapable of following the train of my own creative thoughts. I needed a project that I could manage more easily. So I went back to basics. What do I know and what are my passions? Food, family and the way I was reared were the obvious answers.
I bought a fresh notepad, like the ones I used in college, and wrote down lists and lists of the many foods I could recall from my 1970’s childhood. Once I remembered meatloaf I remembered the vile topping my mother spread on it and the mushy peas she served with it. Once I thought of my school lunch box not only could I recall the waft of its unique damp smell but I remembered soggy egg sandwiches, Telex bars, wagon wheels, Time bars, uneven pieces of Garibaldi biscuits; childhood memories flooded my mind. Like music and smells, food awakened parts of my brain that were dormant for years. I got excited when a reluctant memory sprang forward and revealed itself to me; another gem with the power to bring me back in time.
The Truth is in the Telling: Do or Die
To some people writing is a chore and to others it is a passion. I have always loved writing however, I never imagined that one day my dream of being a published author would ever materialise. My book was published on February 4th 2011 by Y books, a new dynamic Irish publishing house. The title of my book is, Do or Die: How I Escaped Life with a Murderer.
Although the title seems to be shocking, this is the publisher's aim - so that your book can get as much attention as possible when it eventually reaches the book shelves. I remember feeling slightly unsure about the title but, after giving it some thought, it made sense. Publishers may not always agree to the title that you have created for your work, but they are marketing gurus and know more about publishing and the market place than you do as an author. So the author must also feel comfortable with their publisher and trust them with their work.
I remember when I started writing my story I was at first a little apprehensive due to the subject matter that I was going to be writing about, gangland Ireland and domestic abuse, and to the exposure that my story was going to receive.
Getting Personal with Emma Hannigan
When Vanessa asked me to do a piece on writing memoirs I have to admit to being momentarily stumped!
I have no formal training in writing and don’t feel I am in a position to give tips to anybody! So all I can tell you is how I’ve operated from the beginning.
From the first moment I began writing I decided to just be myself. Of course we all long to be the next Cathy Kelly or Marian Keyes. Who wouldn’t want to write like all our literary heroines right?
Pretty quickly I came to the realisation that it’s not possible to mimic another person.
We’ve all seen those documentaries with Scary-Mary-Madzers who spend a small fortune on plastic surgery to look like their favourite Hollywood star. Does it ever work? Are we all impressed if a person changes their face in an attempt to look like another? I’m guessing most of us would say no.
Writing is no different in my mind. We should all be true to ourselves and write from the heart using our own voice.
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