Not Quite So Blonde

Wasn't Marilyn Monroe the prototype blonde bimbo?  Well actually, no.

Susie Mesure writes in The Independent that a collection of Munroe's writings entitled Fragments :

.. reveals her passion for James Joyce, Walt Whitman and Samuel Beckett ... She had a vast library, which included works by George Bernard Shaw, Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, D H Lawrence, F Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck, as well as Joyce, which she took with her whenever she moved house, something she did many times over her short lifetime. Her copy of Ulysses fetched $9,200 (£5,800) at an auction of her possessions by Christie's in 1999. While in Hollywood, she briefly took evening courses in art appreciation and literature at UCLA before withdrawing after her presence proved too distracting for the other students.

And she also had, apparently : 

... a flair for writing words as well as speaking them.

This is a book I'm waiting for!
(* to be published this Autumn by Editions du Seuil in France and U.S. publishing house Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Amanda at Times with Diamonds

Over ten years ago, Amanda sat on a plane for Bangkok, on the way to her Times grandmother's cremation. She had not been back since childhood and she finds the city of her youth is disappearing...

Author Amanda Kovattana will be talking about her new memoir at Times Bookstore at Pavilion KL, this Friday (31st) 4-6p.m.

According to the blurb on Horizon's website Diamonds in My Pocket is a her story of growing up:

Only child of a beautiful blond English expatriate and the brilliant scion of an upper class Thai family, Amanda Kovattana came of age in the long-vanished world of aristocratic Bangkok. In this exquisitely-rendered memoir, Kovattana produces a chiaroscuro canvas full of sights and sounds and smells, of daily lives textured by honor and tradition, of a family ruptured by deceit and jealousy. Caught in a web of tensions between her mother and father, between East and West, the Old World and the New, the author finally uncovers the long-buried secrets of her own soul.

The author describes herself on her blog as :

... a free range writer who offers fresh, organically grown perspectives while cultivating a fruitful living as a professional organizer. She was born in England, raised in Bangkok and lives in the San Francisco Bay area.

For the upcoming talk, Amanda shares her thoughts about identity and the tension between the individual and society (two of the underlying themes of Diamonds in My Pocket). She will talk about the experience of growing up in a third culture—an experience many Malaysians are familiar with. And there will be a Q&A session after the talk.

Quite apart from being interested in Amanda the author, I think I desperately need to hire her personal services!

(Thanks Han for the invitation to the event via Facebook.)

Are Your Memories Real?

There's a fascinating piece on false memory from Karl Taro Greenfeld in The Washington Post. Did the unforgettable moments of his life - even if they seem entirely real - really happen?

Memory, neuroscientists now believe, is a pattern or grouping of neighboring neurons firing in the brain in reproduction of the initial pattern that fired when the actual experience happened. Each time that experience is recalled, it triggers a similar pattern of neurons, thus strengthening the memory while at the same time altering it; the grouping may lose a few neurons and gain a few new ones. A memory, in other words, is nothing more than a chemical reaction that is subject to the same variations and inconsistencies as any other human endeavor; we can be no more sure of the accuracy of our recollections than we can be of, say, the accuracy of the next foul shot in basketball. A falsehood can be deposited in the brain and reinforced almost as easily as a true-life experience. Memory is fallible, we all acknowledge that, yet a memoirist is expected to report a version that is true to life.

Of course, all this presents many difficulties for the memoirist, and we've seen not a few cases of false memory highlighted in recent years.

Greenfeld's latest memoir is Boy Alone : A Brother's Memoir is about living with an autistic sibling and you can hear more about it in this podcast.

(Thanks, Chet, for the link.)

Shamsiah Fakeh ... At Last

I was very happy today to finally manage to lay my hands on a copy of Shamsiah Fakeh's memoirs in English! (See here and here for earlier posts about the book.)

Here's the cover blurb :

Shamsiah Fakeh was a leader in the independence movement among a group of Malay women who fought persistently right into the jungles of Malaya. She was the head of Angkatan Wanita Sedar (AWAS), which joined forces with Angkatan Pemuda Insaf (API) as flag bearers in the demand for independence from the British. Her collaboration with Ahmad Boestamam, the API head, stoked the spirits of a substantial number of Malayan youths to take up arms against the colonisers. Shamsiah also joined the 10th Regiment, the Malay wing of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). Her life was filled with thorny obstacles.

She got lost a few times in the jungle in pursuit of the armed struggle for independence. Her struggle was regardless of place, whether in the jungle or the international arena. She and her husband Ibrahim were sent to China, Indonesia and Vietnam within a framework of inflaming the spirit of nationalism among the people of Southeast Asia who were still colonised then. Shamsiah sacrificed her life and limb to free Malaya through a path that was hers to choose. After she was expelled from the MCP, she stayed on in China and continued her life there working in a ball-bearing factory. She and her family finally returned to Malaysia on 23 July 1994 after the Peace Accords between the MCP and the Malaysian and Thai governments were signed in Haadyai, Thailand, in 1989. Upon her return home, she lived a moderate life in her old age with her children and grandchildren. She never regretted rising against the British and never regretted going into the jungle to join the Communist Party. She was grateful that her struggle had unsettled the colonisers.

She believed and was confident that the young generation who understood the true history of the country would be able to find their direction.

By the way, I bought it in MPH Bangsar Village 1, the larger Bangsar Village 2 branch having mysteriously disappeared. These are hard times for booksellers.

Pain on the Page

I wrote about our son with huge trepidation. As a novelist, honesty has always been my goal: get it down as it really is, not as you would like it to be. In writing this story, I had to write and think about things I found very difficult, very intimate, sometimes shaming. I had to describe how it felt to watch your child – previously the gentlest person you could think of – kick down locked doors in fury because he’d been denied money. I also had to put myself in Mary’s mother’s place and, holding in my hands the pitiful little journal where she described burying one child after another, acknowledge that our life was not so bad. Our boy was still out there. We had hope.

I finished the book. It took some courage to show it to my son, but I knew I had to. His response – typically generous and imaginative – is described at the end. A writer and a musician too, he understands that you write what you have to write. What he probably doesn’t understand is my impulse to share our experience with other parents. But for me that has become paramount. Not nearly enough is known or understood about skunk. There were times when we thought we were going mad. When other parents shared their (identical) experiences with us, it proved a lifelineBack to that thorny question of how far it is acceptable to use personal pain and family trauma as fuel for fiction.

Julie Myerson's The Lost Child has recently attracted a great deal of controversy (e.g.), and the publisher has now brought forward the publication date to take advantage of the tide of outrage it has created. Minette Marrin in The Sunday Times said it was :

... a betrayal not just of love and intimacy, but also of motherhood itself ...

(And don't you just love Marrin's first line? :

A family into which a writer is born is a ruined family.)

In the book Myerson (who was longlisted for the Booker in 2003) details her painful relationship with her son, Jake, and her decision to change the locks on the family home because of his use of skunk cannabis (apparently a genetically modified version and up to 30 times stronger than the usual stuff). To get an idea of just what she had to contend with, take a look at this extract from the book and this piece from The Telegraph. Another extract, which I lifted the quote above from, can be found here. (Am I the only one reminded of Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin?)

Jake Myerson, who now works in the music industry, sees matters in a very different light and told reporters :

What she has done has taken the very worst years of my life and cleverly blended it into a work of art, and that to me is obscene. I was only 17, I was a confused teenager, I was too young really to know who I was or what was happening. What she describes in her book are a series of incidents, it's not who I am and I find it very sad that she feels the need to tar me with the 'drug addict' brush. She's been writing about me since I was two, and, quite frankly, I'm not surprised by anything she does any more. She's a writer and like a lot of writers she is wrapped up in her own world - even if the worlds they are creating aren't quite true, they become true to them anyway, and I wasn't prepared to let her world colour mine any more.

Anyway, this is all excellent publicity for the book ... just when we thought the market for misery memoirs was shrinking!

Worth reading is Charlotte Northedge's in The Guardian piece on the fallout of miserylit for the author's nearest and dearest. (Star readers will spot that the piece was reproduced in today's edition.)

Postscript :

Worth reading too is Geoffrey Myerson's account.

An interesting point from Neill Denny in The Bookseller :

The important overall point for the wider book trade is that the episode has served to underline the primacy of the book in our media hierachy. Would Myerson's revelations have counted for so much had they been expressed through any other media? A book confers a status and finality on a story that even now news­papers, television, the internet, radio—you name it—can only dream of. Remember that the next time you hear some media pundit glibly predicting the death of the book.

From False Memoir to Novel

Exactly what I thought should happen too - a falsified memoir gets turned into a work of fiction.

Remember a week or two ago I told you about Herman Rosenblat's Angel at the Fence? The original publisher canceled publication after some details were found to be false. Film rights were sold, and now a second publisher has made a deal for a novel adapted from the film.

This way a very valid story is not lost to the world, but readers aren't deceived. And I really wish that could be the case with some of the other bogus memoirs I've been blogging about ...

Postscript :

Very interesting side story - Dan Bloom in Taiwan was apparently the one who initially blew the whistle on the bogusness of Rosenblat's book ... while Gabe Sherman and The New Republic take the credit.

Hope Filled - But Sadly Hoax

I question why I never questioned it. I believed it; it was an incredible, hope-filled story.

confesses literary agent Andrea Hurst about Herman Rosenblat's Angel at the Fence told how he and his wife met and fell in love on opposite sides of a barbed-wire fence as children in a concentration camp. And amazingly, he met the girl who'd saved his life years later - on a blind date!

Oprah featured the couple on her show. (You can see them below in a CBS news report) :



But holocaust historians and journalists questioned the veracity of aspects of the story (specifically that she threw him food and thus kept him alive) and the plug was pulled on the book. The movie deal too was off.

Rosenblat, though, says that he told the story the way he remembered it.

You may remember that there have been a whole string of "bogus memoirs" over the past few years, and one of the more recent featured another holocaust survivor, Misha Fonseca, with the incredible story of having been saved by wolves.

And I heard from a friend of another memoir set during the holocaust, this time by an elderly woman living in Britain, and that too was axed shortly before it was due to come out, after a prominent holocaust genealogist questioned some aspects of it. The author claims it was entirely true and those who have read it gave it very positive reviews. (Not mentioning specifics or giving links here because neither author or publisher would probably want the attention - but very sadly, the affair dealt a heavy financial blow to the small press in question.)

Anyway, it will be interesting to see if Oprah hauls Rosenblat up on her show to give him a good talking to as she did with James Frey!

(Thanks Chet for forwarding the link. The story is also in the Guardian today.)

Things Turn Ugly for Constance Bristow

Readers of this blog will know that truth vs fiction in memoir writing is a topic that has come up again and again over the past year or so, as the demand for stories depicting (particularly miserable) real life experience has grown.

Now things have turned ugly (if you will forgive the pun) for Constance Briscoe who is being sued by her mother over allegations of physical and emotional abuse made in her memoir.

Mrs. Briscoe has called her daughter, who is one of Britain's first black female judges, a "wicked thief and a liar" and told the court that she had forged documents for her defence. Briscoe admits she made some mistakes with the details in her book, but stands by the substance of her allegations. The case continues.

You can watch an interview with Briscoe on Sky Television's The Book Show :



Postscript :

On the Guardian blog Alison Flood asks whether this is the end of the "misery memoir".

Another Postscript :

Briscoe breaks down as she gives evidence and tells how she attempted suicide by drinking bleach, because of her mother's cruelty.

Manternity Memoir

Once the secret was out, curious teenagers rang the doorbell of their home, wanting to stare at the “pregnant man.” (Later, they left a lullaby music box on the doorstep.) Beatie also had to improvise “manternity” clothes to cover his baby bump. With this book, he transforms his story from freak show to family circus, calmly recounting his lifelong struggle to make his exterior match his interior. “Define Normal” is the defiant title of his first chapter, and also the name of his screen-printing business in Bend. His daughter, Susan, now four months old, enters the world with two baby books on her shelf, and with a book of her own to write, should she choose to, down the line: “Define Family.”

The first male ever to give birth to a baby has written a memoir. Liesl Schllinger tells Thomas Beatie's remarkable story on the New York Times Papercuts blog. There's more here too.

Author Unclear on the Concept?

From Meg Cabot, author of The Princess Diaries series, in Star Two today :

Someday I might do a memoir, but I don’t think I could write about it from a fictional character’s point of view. I’ve just tried tonnes of times and have never been able to finish it.

Well duh!

Did Stephanie Yap who interviewed Cabot for the Straits Times in Singapore simply misquote her? Or is this a sinister comment on the state of memoir writing in modern times?

Postscript :

Peter Robbins picks this up on the Telegraph blog!

(Thanks a lot to Poppadumdum for laughing at this line first.)

Author as Vampire

Jason Steger looks at Fact, fiction and the writer's quest for 'a kind of truth' at The Age. I live this quote from author Helen Garner :

Artists are robbers and use the lives around them, and the ones who don't are talking bullshit.

Complete Surrender

Real life has the habit of being stranger than fiction, and this is nowhere more convincingly confirmed than with the story of how Ian McEwan discovered that he had a brother he had never known about.

But it was really Dave Sharpe's story to tell, and tell it he has, in a (ghost written) memoir Complete Surrender, due to be launched if a few day's time.

McEwan's foreword for the book, which can be read on the Guardian website, is a most moving essay about how his brother's illegitimate birth and handing over to strangers on a railway platform has forced a painful reevaluation of family history, and of parents who almost certainly carried the pain of the lost child (whose existence they never acknowledged) to the end of their days.

Isabel and the Family Saga

I was sad that I missed Isabel Allende being interviewed on the BBC's Hardtalk by Sarah Montegue the other day about her new memoir The Sum Of Our Days. It isn't possible to watch the programmes on the BBC website anymore now that they are changing to a new system (the BBC i-Player) which we can't subscribe to here (yet?). But some kind soul put a fair chunk of the interview on YouTube (Part 1, Part 2).

Allende talks about how she draws on her family for inspiration, how this is the second memoir written to Paula, her daughter who died, and also about how she writes.

What you may not know - she starts every new book on January 8th, and before that doesn't even know what the first sentence will be, let alone the plot!

Best quote from the interview :

If I had to chose between a relative and a good story, I'd chose the story.

There's more about the book on the Harper Collins website.

Nasty Naipaul

You might remember Paul Theroux's Sir Vidia's Shadow, the novelist and travel writer's memoir of his 30 year (somewhat troubled) relationship with the author V.S. Naipaul, who was once his mentor and friend.

Now in the Times, Theroux responds to a new biography which he sees as complete vindication for his own harsh treatment of Sir Vidia between the pages. Describing Naipaul as :

... a grouch, a skinflint, tantrum-prone, with race on the brain. He was then, and continued to be, an excellent candidate for anger management classes, sensitivity training, psychotherapy, marriage guidance, grief counselling and driving lessons – none of which he pursued.

reading Patrick French’s authorised (!) biography, The World Is What It Is, he finds that he didn't know :

... the half of all the horrors. ... Now French’s biography amply demonstrates everything I said and more. It is not a pretty story; it will probably destroy Naipaul’s reputation for ever, this chronicle of his pretensions, his whoremongering, his treatment of a sad, sick wife and disposable mistress, his evasions, his meanness, his cruelty amounting to sadism, his race baiting. Then there is the “gruesome sex”, the blame shifting, the paranoia, the disloyalty, the nasty cracks and the whining, the ingratitude, the mood swings, the unloving and destructive personality.

Sounds completely unmissable actually!

(Thanks Jordan for the link.)

More on Dodgy Memoirs

There's more discussion in the papers on those dodgy memoirs.

Andy McSmith in the Independent doesn't have much sympathy for Margaret Jones' publishers :

An unkind reaction might be that the world of publishing has been asking to be taken for a ride by someone like Margaret Seltzer for a very long time. Ever since McCourt won the Pulitzer Prize more than 10 years ago for his childhood memoir Angela's Ashes, the doors of publishing houses have swung open to more and more people with personal stories to tell about bad things that happened to them when they were young. ... This genre is booming as other aspects of publishing are struggling, and now have spawned three sub-genres – memoirs you can rely on, memoirs that are a bit dodgy but still a good read, and memoirs that are a pack of lies.

Wouldn't it be nice to see these on separate shelves in the bookshops, or some sort of coding system so readers know where they stand?

If all this talk about bogus misery memoirs has got you thinking that you might quite like to write one of your own (and hey, I'm sure that in Malaysia you'd stand a pretty good chance of getting away with it!) John Crace in the Guardian offers us an excellent how-to guide to the genre.

Now then, did you know that Heath Ledger kept a diary which is about to be published?

Well .... actually he didn't. The Last Days of Heath Ledger to be published in Esquire magazine is a fictional account of the actors last days in London and New York.

Tim Arango in the New York Times isn't too taken with the idea:

You are losing the veracity of journalism, and you are losing the imaginative license of fiction. You run the risk of ending up with something that is neither true nor interesting.

The same could be said for all those bogus misery memoirs, couldn't it?

Made-Up Memoir and Consequences

One can hardly credit it but the New York Times has yet another story of a memoirist being forced to come clean about their fakery! Margaret B. Jones, author of Love and Consequences :

.. about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods.

(First chapter here.)

Except, as Motoko Rich points out,

The problem is that none of it is true. ... Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. Nor did she graduate from the University of Oregon, as she had claimed.

Ouch!

Jones was outed by her own sister. The books have been recalled, the promotional tour cancelled. Ms Jones side of the story is that she was just giving a voice to the kind of people who don't usually get listened to.

One wonders why the lack of faith in fiction? That is worrying me every bit as much as the epidemic (for such it is) of fakery.

I was interested in what Preeta said in the comments to the previous bogus memoir post:

I really think the reason we're seeing so many of these now is the whole confessional culture -- people *want* to read "true stories," and everywhere I turn I hear vapid comments like "I felt I could relate to this more because it was a true story." Certainly as a young writer in the US one is repeatedly told that nonfiction sells these days, write a memoir, write a memoir, it's what people want to read. Of course if you have any integrity you will resist the temptation to write a memoir unless you really have something to say about your own life, but then if more people had integrity the world would be a very different place indeed, and not just in terms of what sells in the bookshops :-) . Perhaps the more interesting question is, why is it that people these days feel they can only "relate" to true stories?!? Whatever happened to being able to relate to fictional characters?

To even things up perhaps, Claire Armistead on the Guardian blog has an intriguing post about a work of memoir that has been published as a novel in the US; and another published as a novel in Russia and a memoir in the UK!

Armistead says that :

Of all the genres around at the moment I find memoir the most troubling - and at the heart of the trouble is the notion of a form of truth that is by necessity not the same as a got-out-of-bed-and-brushed-my-teeth reality. But who is to decide where the line lies?

Postscript:

A day on, Motoko Rich examines the fallout.

Lying with Wolves

Here's news of yet another bogus memoir, this one entirely made up as Rachel Field discovers in the Independent.

Belgian author Misha Defonseca's 1997 Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years describes how the author (pictured left) at six years old :

... trudged across three countries to try to find her Jewish parents who had been carted off to Auschwitz by the Nazis. She collapsed in a forest but was rescued by pack of wolves who adopted her as their cub.

Now that does seem to me to be rather a large stretch of the imagination (whether you factor in the wolves or not) and I'm surprised at the surprise that has met the announcement just a few weeks after the premier of the film version that Defonseca invented the story!

The Belgian newspaper Le Soir blew the whistle and discovered along the way that Defonseca is not Jewish but Roman-Catholic and (get this!) has a parent who was probably a Nazi collaborator.

The 71 year old author has issued an apology:

This story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving. ... I ask forgiveness to all who felt betrayed.

She said that the story was her way of coping with a deeply unhappy childhood with an adoptive family who called her the daughter of a traitor and that she:

... found it difficult to differentiate between what was real and what was part of my imagination.

Her lawyer in a letter to the newspaper said :

It matters little whether the account is real or partly allegorical, it is the product of absolute good faith, a cry of suffering and an act of courage. In that it deserves only respect.

Now me, I've no problem at all with that. (I'm finding it hard to summon up any of my usual outrage at all.)

But just call it fiction, okay?

(You can read extracts from the book here. And watch the film trailer below.)



Postscript :

This isn't the only scandal that has dogged (wolved?) the book.

Scandal Proof Your Writing

Plagiarism scandals.

Memoirs that turn out to be a little factually suspect.

Levi Asher on the Guardian blog reckons journalists and publishers

... must must take some of the blame for the lack of clarity regarding truth in authorship ...

and offers the following guidelines to help authors avoid scandal:

1. Do not use the word "memoir" unless you mean it.

2. If you're not sure whether what you're writing is a memoir or not, guess what? It's a novel.

3. No more than half a page of plagiarism per book.

4. Don't make up exact dates that you can't remember. Instead, be general: "The most important day of my life was the day of my son's birth, in the summer of 2005 ..."

5. Just say no to sending a friend out in public with a wig as you.

6. If you're in a flame war and you're about to go sock puppet, take a 10-minute break and go to a coffee shop without a wi-fi facility. Maybe the walk will cool you down.

7. Go ahead and make up dialogue. Everybody except Tom Wolfe does.

8. Pick a name. "Benjamin Black is John Banville" is just not a good look.

Want to know why he chooses these particular tips? Check out the post.

And while we're on the subject of memoirs that don't quite factually check out, the Australian reports that the authenticity of Ishmael Beah's acclaimed but now somewhat discredited A Long Way Gone will be discussed by a panel of academics at a reading festival in Portland, Oregon this week.

Methinks the whole issue has gone cold already.

Does the Truth Matter in Memoir?

More questions are being asked now about the accuracy of Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone (now incidentally a best seller here in Malaysia), with the Australian still hot on the case.

Not only does there appear to be a "timeline discrepancy", (and more evidence on this score has been collected by the newspapers European corespondent Peter Wilson who publicly confronted Beah with it) but it seems that the deadly fight that Beah describes in a UNICEF rehabilitation camp (and one of the scenes in the book that most shocked me) may not have taken place - relief workers and international agencies have said that they could find no record of such a thing happening. Enough evidence is in to seriously question the veracity of the book.

Leaving quite aside the question of the morality of passing off something as memoir when it contains fictitious elements, just how does it get past the editor and publisher anyway? (And don't forget, there have been not just one but several cases in past years of memoir fakery and/or embellishment - see here and here which ought to have made publishers jumpy.)

Deborah Hope does the rounds of Australian publishers to see what measures for checking veracity are in place. Not many, it seems.

The paper's New York correspondent quotes Janice Harayda, a former vice-president of the National Book Critics Circle as saying that the US literary establishment gave former Sierra Leone child soldier Ishmael Beah a "free pass" on the accuracy of his international bestselling memoir A Long Way Gone because it wanted to believe his story was true. She adds that she believes that an investigation is long overdue:

The truth matters ... If there are parts of this book that are not based on real events or are not part of the writer's personal experience, then these should be identified somewhere in the book.

When Dan Chaon, Beah's creative writing teacher at Oberon College, Ohio was challenged he said that:

... factual inaccuracies did not necessarily compromise the work because it was a memoir rather than a piece of journalism.

Which isn't I'm afraid my own understanding of "memoir".

And I have to agree with Harayda:

... There is a clear line between fiction and non-fiction ... Readers bring different expectations to non-fiction and they have a right to know whether it is fiction or has been fictionalised.

Brian Appleyard in the Sunday Times discoveres that the scale of a map included in the book is wildly inaccurate and makes Beah's wanderings look more pronounced than they could possibly have been.

In all this, though, I feel extremely sorry for Beah, who has surely gone through enough pain and trauma in his short life, and whether or not always factually accurate, has written an exceptionally powerful book full of strong emotional truth. He was trying to survive a situation that remains beyond our worst nightmares, and he was at times high on drugs. He didn't have a watch or a calendar in the jungle. Memory lapses could be expected. Probably the line between objective fact and just telling the best story was blurred for him.

But does that fully exonerate him, or Chaon, or his publishers?

I think the only honourable way out for all concerned is to admit fault and print a simple disclaimer to go with the book:

Some parts of this story have been fictionalised.

We will still love the book, and Beah has survived much much worse.

Ballard's Miracles

To return to Shanghai, for the first time since I was a boy, was a strange experience for me. Memories were waiting for me everywhere, like old friends at an arrivals gate, each carrying a piece of cardboard bearing my name. I looked down from my room on the 17th floor of the Hilton and could see at a glance that there were two Shanghais – the skyscraper city newer than yesterday and at street level the old Shanghai that I had cycled around as a boy.

I slipped out of the hotel and began to walk the street. The pavements were already crowded with food vendors, porters steering new photocopiers into office entrances, smartly dressed young secretaries shaking their heads at a plump and sweating 60-year-old European out on some dishevelled errand.

And I was on an errand, though I had yet to grasp the true nature of my assignment. I was looking for my younger self, the boy in a Cathedral school cap and blazer who had played hide-and-seek with his friends half a century earlier. I soon found him, hurrying with me along the Bubbling Well Road, smiling at the puzzled typists and trying to hide the sweat that drenched my shirt.

JG Ballard reminisces about his childhood in Shanghai in his new biography Miracles of Life, dues out next month. (This piece from a longer extract was published in the Times and the author is also interviewed by Stuart Wavell, here.)

Ballard was imprisoned as a boy in a Japanese prison camp which inspired his most famous novel, Empire of the Sun. (Later made into an excellent film by Stephen Spielberg.)

The biography was written after he was diagnosed with prostrate cancer in 2006: nothing focuses the mind half as well as time running out.

(Thanks Twan for sending me the link.)