Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Jonathan Taylor writes about A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline & Other Lessons from Goldsmiths Press.
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“We’ll look back on this and laugh”: What I learned about memoir in writing A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline & Other Lessons
When I was little, my family got stranded in Calais on the way back from holiday. The Channel crossings were all cancelled because of a huge storm. Tens of thousands of travellers were stuck in the port. The six of us – including my baby sister – had to sleep on the floor, just outside the travel agent’s desk.
The thing I remember most about the experience was my mother – who must have been pretty desperate with a baby, three other children, suitcases, and no sleep – turning to me and saying, “Don’t worry, Jonathan. It’s not the worst thing that could happen. Just think, in the future, we’ll look back on this and laugh.” You might say it’s a very British thing to say. I’ve also come to think it’s an attitude that haunts the structure of many memoirs – especially British memoirs.
The modern memoir, as Judith Barrington points out in her brilliant book on the subject, is a “hybrid form.” It weaves together elements of autobiography, biography, social history, poetry, philosophy, psychology with storytelling techniques imported from fiction. It is a patchwork of seemingly conflicting genres, registers, voices – often moving quickly from, say, an immersive childhood scene, replete with re-imagined dialogue, to a very grown-up meditation on the psychology thrown up by that scene.
Herein lies one of the form’s central incongruities: its strange layering of voices, often of an adult voice on top of childhood voice. Sometimes, the two voices are explicitly superimposed on each other – as, for instance, when the author invokes temporal distance in their storytelling (“I remember …” as Joe Brainard puts it). Sometimes, the two seem to be divided (as in the example above, where the grown-up meditation comes after the childhood scene).
I say seem, because any such division is actually an illusion: even the most immersive childhood voice is still only a simulation, a shaped recollection haunted by the implied adult narrator – and the reader knows this. An adult memoirist can never wholly inhabit their childhood consciousness. There is always some kind of dual focus in memoir, between present and past, adult and child, narrating self and experiencing self, however sublimated.
For James Olney, this dual focus means that there is often a “great emotional and intellectual divide [in] … autobiography, giving an ironic … distancing to the past.” Hence, the mode of narration is often infused with a “kind of … semi-comic irony, exercised at the expense of a younger self,” a “self-mockery.” To put this another way, memoirs enshrine, in the very way they’re told, my mother’s dictum: “in the future, we’ll look back on this and laugh.”
While writing my second memoir, A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline & Other Lessons (Goldsmiths, 2024), I became hyper-aware of this dual focus, and came to understand it as the central challenge of what I was trying to do. In large part, A Physical Education is about experiences of childhood bullying – my own, and those of famous literary characters – but these experiences are framed by an adult perspective that seeks to contextualise bullying in terms of theory (from philosophy, sociology, and literary criticism). Hence the book foregrounds its dual focus from the start, moving as it does between immersive storytelling and retrospective theorising. My aim was to explore bullying both from “within” (experientially) and from “above” (theoretically), so I could come to some understanding of both its subjective and objective patterns.
As Olney suggests, this dual focus serves to create an “emotional and intellectual divide” in the book, between the different sections. I don’t necessarily think this is a problem: as Barrington points out, readers of memoirs generally expect the narration to move between, on the one hand, immersive “self-revelation” and, on the other, what she calls “musing” or “analysis.” Patrick Madden says something similar, suggesting that the memoirist “may utilize all the devices and techniques of fiction to establish vivid scenes,” but unlike a fiction writer “she will not simply lead readers to the edge of a hinted meaning and expect them to do the work.” Instead, she “will take [the reader] … inside her own mind’s engagement with the stories, to process them and to make meaning.”
Before A Physical Education, I would have argued that this dynamic movement between “vivid scenes” and explicit analyses of their “meaning” was what gave the modern memoir its unique energy as a form. But writing A Physical Education taught me that there are also pitfalls to this dual focus. As Olney might suggest, the retrospective analyses of “meaning,” the passages of “musing,” can result in an “ironic … distancing to the past,” which subverts the emotional immediacy of the scenes described. Given the visceral and, for many, traumatic nature of my memoir’s subject matter – bullying – I came to realise that such distancing might end up conflicting with the seriousness of what I was talking about.
Even more worrying, though, was the realisation, when I came to redraft the book, that many of my immersive scenes were also infected by “ironic … distancing,” and a “semi-comic irony, exercised at the expense of a younger self,” a “self-mockery.” It wasn’t just a matter of the theoretical passages distancing the childhood scenes through simple juxtaposition: rather, the latter were also infused with a kind of retrospective humour my mother might have understood (“in the future, we’ll look back on this and laugh”).
No doubt this semi-comedy, at the expense of my younger self, was born from good intentions. I felt uncomfortable claiming any kind of exceptional victimhood, stating explicitly at one point that
my experiences were relatively tame in the grand scheme of things. This book is by no means about how uniquely terrible my school days were. Some memoirs are about exceptional lives, some about representative experiences; this book leans towards the latter. Mine were common or garden experiences, neither exceptionally bad nor great, just representative of the time – and, in a displaced way, representative of other times, too. Like many people’s, they were a weird mixture of the banal and horrible, the absurd and nasty, the silly and serious.
It was important to me, in this regard, to contextualise my own experiences of bullying as “a white boy in the UK.” As such, “I was cushioned from many of the more extreme forms of bullying. I witnessed but was (obviously) not subjected to the kind of politicised bullying that’s motivated by misogyny or racism.”
Still, there is a difference between, on the one hand, acknowledging your privilege, and, on the other, mocking your younger self’s experiences to the extent that you seem to be downplaying the seriousness of bullying per se. In editing and redrafting A Physical Education, I came to understand that my use of self-deprecating humour was in danger of doing this – of downplaying what for many is a horrific and life-changing experience. It was so for me too, particularly as an adult, and perhaps the humour was there, if I’m going to be totally honest, as a way of denying my own trauma.
As many critics have said, humour itself can be a sign of privilege, especially British self-deprecating humour. After all, you can only afford to laugh at yourself if you are in a certain position of authority. The idea has its roots in what’s called the “superiority theory” of humour, which has a long philosophical lineage. At the most basic level, the superiority theory suggests that we laugh at people because we feel superior to them.
In the memoir form, you might say the adult narrator internalises this feeling of superiority, and ends up laughing at their younger self. This is the “self-mockery” that Olney talks about – and, oddly enough, it’s very similar to one of the principal techniques of bullying. Bullying frequently involves superior laughter at another, weaponising humour as a way of belittling the victim’s experience (“Of course we weren’t bullying you, just horsing around, don’t you have a sense of humour?”).
I came gradually to understand all this in editing and redrafting A Physical Education. I realised that my predilection for knockabout comedy and self-mockery was in danger of being dishonest, both as regards my own experiences of bullying, and others’. One of the strengths of the memoir form, of course, is that you can talk explicitly about the writing and research process within it – so I decided to address the issue directly, about two-thirds of the way through the book. This is what I wrote:
Adulthood can be a form of emotional amnesia: all too often, adults forget or repress their own childhood terrors, and hence can’t comprehend how anxious most schoolchildren are, whether they show it or not. That’s one reason why novels … and poems … are so important: they remember the intensity of childhood for us. In George Eliot’s words, they attempt to “recall [the] … early bitterness [of childhood], and … the strangely perspectiveless conception of life, that gave the bitterness its intensity.” Through such “revived consciousness,” they teach adult-readers not to “pooh-pooh the griefs of … children.” By contrast, memoirs, and particularly British memoirs, do sometimes “pooh-pooh” childhood griefs and anxieties. This is due to the way they’re narrated, which usually involves an older narrator looking back on a younger self. All too easily, such a mode of narration can seem condescending, the older self patronising their own younger self, retrospectively superimposing a humorous lens on experiences that were far from funny at the time. No doubt this present memoir is guilty of that, too, at times: of trying to make light of things that were harrowing when I was young, of trying to distance childhood trauma, of adding a pinch of adult-salt to immersiveness, of asking: Why on Earth did that upset me so much back then? There wasn’t even a cane or fist involved, mere words and looks. It all seems so trivial, laughable in retrospect.
All this is why, in later drafts of A Physical Education, I trimmed a lot of the comedy, taking away some of the “adult-salt,” which distanced or weakened the immersiveness.
Still, there were no simple answers here, and I certainly didn’t eliminate all the humour or irony from the book. Far from it: I still think humour is an important component of memoir-writing. Rather, it was a matter of striking the right balance in terms of tone. Few people would want to read a monolithically serious memoir which self-indulgently claims exceptional victim status. That too would be a form of dishonesty on my part, given my privilege, and also given that many of my experiences at school did involve a lot of humour and comedy (from both victims and bullies).
Memoirs, I believe, are very good at capturing the emotional ambivalence of difficult experiences – what Michel de Montaigne calls life’s intermingling of “laughter and tears.” There is, though, an important distinction to be made between laughter that was there at the time, integral to the experience, and laughter imposed in hindsight. The latter, if used in a memoir, needs to be handled very carefully if it isn’t to seem patronising or “superior.”
Still, my mother was right to some extent: it is the case that some experiences come to seem laughable in retrospect. That retrospective humour can suggest a new perspective, an enhanced self-knowledge, and these are strengths when it comes to passages of musing or analysis in memoir. But the whole point of the memoir form is its “dual focus,” which means that both perspectives matter – the child’s and the adult’s – and both should be given equal weight. Otherwise, all we’re doing is recycling our society’s dismissal of children’s voices. All we’re doing is bullying our childhood selves for a second time.
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Acknowledgements
Thank you to Louise Peterkin for her kind help with this article.
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Works Cited
Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir (Portland: Eighth Mountain Press, 2003).
Joe Brainard, I Remember (London: Notting Hill Editions, 2012).
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, ed. A. S. Byatt (London: Penguin, 2003).
Patrick Madden, “The New Memoir,” in The Cambridge Companion to Autobiography, ed. Maria DiBattista and Emily O. Wittman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp.222-36.
Michel de Montaigne, “How We Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing,” in The Complete Essays, ed. and trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 2003), pp.262-5. James Olney, “The Uses of Comedy and Irony in Autobiographies and Autobiography,” Yeats, 2 (1984), 195-208.
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Jonathan Taylor is an author, editor, lecturer and critic. His books include the memoirs A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline & Other Lessons (Goldsmiths, 2024) and Take Me Home (Granta, 2007), and the novels Melissa (Salt, 2015) and Entertaining Strangers (Salt, 2012). He directs the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester in the UK. Originally from Stoke-on-Trent, he now lives in Leicestershire with his wife, the poet Maria Taylor, and their twin daughters, Miranda and Rosalind. His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk.