Three ways to mix memory and desire on Day 2 of the Jaipur Litfest

There was no Bollywood (good) but there was cricket (sigh) and football (better). But there was oh so much of good literature on the second day of the Jaipur Literature Festival 2016. Oh and did we mention Stephen Fry? Here's what we loved most:

Selfie: the art of the memoir

As moderator Samanth Subramaniam quipped, this panel, featuring Stephen Fry, Brigid Keenan, Christina Lamb, Esther Freud, Helen MacDonald, and Blake Morrison, was large enough to form a literary festival audience of its own. Still, aided by Subramaniam’s able and erudite questioning, and the strength and diversity of the writers on stage, it was one of the most exciting ones at the festival.

Iconic comedian Stephen Fry made the audience giggle even before the conversation began, by standing up and taking a picture of the massive crowd that had gathered to attend the panel. Brigid Keenan, who has just finished a memoir about her childhood in India, elicited gales of laughter and applause for her recitation of Little Miss Muffet in Hindi, which she was taught at the age of six.

The panelists spoke about the guilt that often accompanies the writing of the memoir. Writing about the self essentially also entails telling other people’s stories, and the memoir writer must grapple with the dilemma of revealing these stories.

Blake Morrison said that to him, writing about other people is an act of homage rather than aggression. Morrison, who has written two memoirs, one about his father and another about his mother, said, “People think of memoir-writing as a narcissistic, solipsistic ego trip,” but that often it is more about other people than oneself. Helen MacDonald said that putting oneself in the story was a balanced way of writing, and not simply an obsession.

Christina Lamb spoke about her work as reportage, and not memoir writing per se. The desire to have a narrator at all, she said, is because she wants the complex stories she tells to resonate with people. “I tried very hard to find another character [other than myself] to tell the story of Farewell Kabul, but I finally realised that this person [I was looking for] was me.”

Esther Freud spoke about her autobiographical novel Hideous Kinky, which chronicles and fictionalises the time she spent with her mother and sister in Morocco when she was a child. The novel’s genesis was in about ten pages of material she’d written from what she could remember of this time. She wasn’t sure what to do with it, so she showed it to someone, who told her to make up the parts she couldn’t recall. “That was the best piece of advice I’d ever had,” she said.

"Even children’s literature is not infantile in the way that American culture is infantile."

— Stephen Fry

How Writers Write

Meru Gokhale moderated a discussion featuring Vivek Shanbag, Esther Freud, Casey Schwartz, and Sidin Vadukut about the writing process. The panelists spoke about the strategies they employ to empathise with their characters and thus make them more well-rounded, how the smallest idea can eventually become a book, and how they survive the fear of not knowing whether their writing will take them where they want to go.

Vivek Shanbag said that he is often asked whether what he writes is from his own experiences, and feels compelled to say yes, because the writing process is so intense for him that by the time he’s finished, it does feel akin to personal experience. To him, getting inside a character’s head is “the most challenging and the most pleasurable thing about writing.” Esther Freud said that she sometimes gets so lost within the character she is writing that she catches herself acting out physical movements as if she were them.

The writers also discussed the importance of a writing routine to combat the uncertainty of the creative process. Casey Schwartz said, “It really is just getting up, sitting down, and doing it every day, day after day.” Sidin Vadukut said that he tends to take eighteen months to write a book, of which roughly a year is spent just taking notes, making observations and letting the story ferment in his mind.

Aside from insights into their habits and approaches, the writers also spoke about specific aspects of their work. Vadukut revealed that his next project is a fictionalised retelling of the 1890 Bombay plague, which is set in the near future.

Schwartz, whose book In the Mind Fields is about psychoanalysis and neuroscience, firmly disagreed with the notion that creativity can be fully understood by science, saying, “There’s this craze in modern neuroscience that claims we now understand where genius comes from, or where love is located, which is completely reductionist.”

"My books are called Dork, God Save the Dork, and Who Let the Dork Out? I promise the rest of the books are much better than their titles."

— Sidin Vadukut

Black Rainbow: How Poetry Healed My Depression

Psychoanalyst and author Sudhir Kakar introduced the work of Rachel Kelly, who has written a book about her struggle with depression, and the transformative impact that poetry has had on her mental health.

Kelly herself was present, and led an interactive and thoughtful discussion, interspersed with the reading of some of the poems that marked key moments in her healing. She was incredibly honest about the debilitating effects that depression had on her mind and body, which, she argued, are one.

In a remarkable departure from the format of the typical Jaipur Literature Festival panel, Kelly turned to the audience almost immediately, asking and trusting people to stand up if they had experienced mental illness in themselves or someone close to them. She pointed out that it was very important to acknowledge the stigma surrounding mental illness, and that poetry and other arts can be instrumental in defeating this stigma.

Kelly spoke about being diagnosed with depression, and being in intense physical pain during this period. She was put on strong anti-depressants, which didn’t work on her. It was at this point that she first heard a few lines of poetry that she found herself repeating in her mind over and over again.

These were recited by her mother, whose head Kelly said is “richly stocked with poetry.” With readings of poems by Anne Sexton, George Herbert, and Emily Dickinson, this was a most moving session, and inspired many of the attendees to share their own experiences, and their own favourite lines of poetry.

“We can create a context in which our mental health flourishes.”

— Rachel Kelly