Writing the Lives of Ordinary People—Opportunities and Challenges

ABSTRACT

This article explores my experience of undertaking a PhD in Creative Writing using as a starting point my own family history, with its inevitable gaps and unreliable memories. It outlines my reasons for adopting a hybrid structure that includes both fiction and nonfiction and situates the book that I subsequently published in the context of recent writing about the lives of so-called ordinary people by historians, biographers and autobiographers. I reflect on the feedback that I received on my work-in-progress from both historians and the writing community and suggest that their apparently contradictory recommendations to be either more emotional or more factual had the same underlying aim, to transform my writing into a recognisable genre that was not ‘just’ family history. The article describes briefly how self-publishing has democratised the publishing process and allowed me to remain true to my vision for my book. The recognition I have received as a writer about history leads me to hope that, similarly, collaboration between family historians and the academy can democratise the ways in which historical knowledge is acquired and disseminated.

KEYWORDS:

• Family history
• life writing
• biography
• self-publishing

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank participants in the Oxford Centre for Life Writing online writing group in spring 2022 for their insightful and supportive comments on a draft of this article and the anonymous reader who challenged her to refine her thinking about the dividing line between history and fiction.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 After publishing my book I was contacted by a third cousin, a descendant of one of my great-grandmother’s brothers. We had both done a DNA test through the Ancestry website but had no shared DNA at all.

2 ‘I cannot help but be a story-teller, it is my way of describing the world; but I have learned to be a historian, it is my way of understanding the world. I am both’ (Gregory 2005, 242).

3 Although the general public is perhaps less sophisticated in its requirements for classification than we think. People used to ask me how I was getting on with my novel. If I then got drawn into a discussion about why it wasn’t a novel I found a number of them thought Wolf Hall was a biography. According to exasperated academics on Twitter there is a trend amongst students to refer to any long book as a novel.

4 This is not the same as ‘vanity’ or paid for publishing, where an author pays a more or less scrupulous agency to publish their book.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alison Baxter

Alison Baxter completed her PhD in Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes University and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She has published articles in History Today and Topmasts (the newsletter of the Society for Nautical Research) and written blog posts for the Navy Records Society, the Journal of Victorian Culture and the British Association for Local History. She published her book, A Cornish Cargo: The Untold History of a Victorian Seafaring Family, in 2020.