Sex, Sin, and Our Selves. Anna Fisk
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and historical agents, but in a lighter way than in her earlier work.
This neat narrative of Michèle Roberts’s life story is based mostly on her memoir Paper Houses, but could also have been pieced together by information from her interviews and non-fiction writing, which augment the tale told in Paper Houses. It ends at a certain point—around the writing of Impossible Saints—although a little information about the years since are given on the last page, on which Roberts reveals that, after seventeen years together, her marriage to Jim had ended. Even though I already knew that, as the reader of this memoir I encountered the ending of this story with a jolt of sadness for its narrator.
Yet the narrator is not Michèle Roberts the partner, friend, daughter, sibling, step-mother, aunt—at least not the one known by her lovers, friends or family—it is Michèle-Roberts-the-writer, as disclosed to her readers. It is a fiction, but Roberts is well aware of that. She recognizes the “human need to make a shape for the story that we all have . . . autobiography and biography are not very different from fiction: similar impulses and similar stylistic devices are there to make a beautiful or truthful shape.”130 Roberts is also aware of the dangers of unified narratives told in one, omniscient voice. She had deliberately chosen to write novels that experimented with multiple perspectives and fragmented narratives—“plaiting, . . . interweaving down-to-earth voices rather than up-in-the sky ones”—associating omniscient narrators with God, fathers, the Pope. As such, Paper Houses is her only novel-length work which employs a single, ‘reliable’ narrator telling a straightforward narrative.
In the introduction, Roberts reflects on the process of writing her memoir, a fictionalized account of a person and a life, pieced together from the notebooks she wrote at the time: “[w]hen I spread them out on the floor of the room where I write they look like the multi-colored pavement of a piazza. This memoir is like fiction, in as much as I have shaped and edited it, but it is as truthful as I can make it, honouring both facts and the way I saw them at the time.”131 As the editor and shaper of the narrative, she chose, “[o]ut of consideration for others’ privacy,” to omit some “characters” and to “censor some episodes”132—but she recognizes that this is not the only sense in which she is “in charge” of the narrative: “[w]riting this memoir joins up all the scattered bits of me, makes them continuous, gives me a conscious self existing in history . . . Out of what often felt at the time like muddle and mess I subsequently make this memoir, this story.”133 Roberts images the artifice of memoir in terms of her enjoyment of exploring and wandering a city’s streets (of which Paper Houses contains many vivid descriptions): “[m]y narrative in one sense goes in a straight line, chronologically, charting my rake’s progress, but in another sense is a flâneur. It circles around recurrent images and themes, runs back and forth between inner and outer worlds.”134 Thus Roberts’s being “in charge” of the narrative is not the same as having complete control over it: “[y]ou become part of a flow and dance of words. You forget yourself and just get on with writing, just as, walking in the city, you can dissolve into the crowd, simply float, listen, look.”135
Writing her autobiography, “the flâneur enjoys being enticed down side streets,”136 both figuratively and literally. This relates to the importance of place, materiality and home in Roberts’s life-writing (indeed, all her work). The house is a symbol of redemption, but it is not the physical house her memoir is named after, but that which gave her security, meaning and identity during the years of wandering: “[m]y diary was a room of my own in which I could speak and act as I liked. Reading created me a temporary house, spun a cocoon around me.”137 This is carried forward into the future; the final sentence of Paper Houses: “[w]riting goes on too: I keep on building my paper house; my chrysalis.”138
Michèle Roberts’s Life-Writing as Redemptive
For Michèle Roberts writing is home; it is also an alternative vocation. She frequently draws an analogy between her childhood desire to become a nun, and her vocation as a writer, which entails discipline and sacrifice, but has great spiritual reward: “writing is a bit like waiting on God . . . trusting in the darkness, opening yourself up to what comes, being empty . . . I’ve invented my own version of the convent, becoming a writer.”139 This, the connection between writers and saints and Roberts’s interest in medieval literature, means that “spiritual autobiography” as a genre is important in her work. The piece of life-writing, “The Woman Who Wanted to Be a Hero,” reads like a feminist Jungian version of a medieval saint’s spiritual autobiography, describing Roberts’s “journey” to “wholeness.”140 The childhood mystical experiences of interconnection attested to here may also be read in The Wild Girl: “suddenly, with no warning, the world was utterly transformed . . . [t]he universe breathed in and out and I dissolved in it, no longer I . . . This world shimmered and danced and changed constantly, and I, the not-I, was part of it, and understood it, and was it.”141
Although the novel draws on patristic and gnostic texts, Mary’s narration is more akin to that of spiritual autobiography than a gospel. The Book of Mrs Noah features the spiritual autobiography of a nun awaiting the results of a trial for heresy, relating her movement from a guilt-ridden, self-hating religion to a creation and birth-centered spirituality, influenced by (a fictionalized) Marguerite de Porete and the Heresy of the Free Spirit. The struggles of historical women mystics to transmit their ideas, sometimes directly defying the religious authorities, at other times employing cunning strategies of collaboration, are celebrated by Roberts,142 especially in Impossible Saints. Yet this novel, and Daughters of the House, also suggest that women’s spiritual autobiographies are not innocent. In Impossible Saints, Sister Josephine (Roberts’s reimagining of Teresa of Avila) writes a version of her Life that coheres with approved dogma, in order to escape the suspicion of the Inquisition: “[s]he had danced their prescribed dance and performed their set gestures, had sung their recommended song, and received their polite applause.”143 The character of Thérèse in Daughters of the House is inspired by Thérèse of Lisieux, whose posthumous spiritual autobiography The Story of a Soul was exceptionally popular and ensured her canonization in 1925. Roberts’s Thérèse, the pious child who became a nun in the wake of family trauma and secrets, writes her autobiography, “the story of a soul”144 twenty years after leaving home: “I thought if I wrote what happened when we were children it would help me to decide what it is I’ve got to do.”145 Léonie reacts thus: “if you tell any more lies about the past I’ll kill you . . . You always were good at making things up . . . in your version I was the sinner and you were the saint . . . Yours will be the Authorised Version of what happened won’t it.”146 Roberts’s exploration of “a woman’s dodgy desire to control a story”147 in the characters of Léonie and Thérèse, perhaps expresses in fiction an ambivalence about life-writing that does not come across in her interviews and non-fiction. In Daughters of the House there is a sense that the healing and redemption that Roberts elsewhere ascribes to writing is not achieved easily, or without cost.
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