How do you tell your life story?

I’m loving this book about Patrick Modiano’s life. It’s kind of an autobiography but with the big gaps that plague our memory. He says he is putting together his pedigree or curriculum vitae, to get rid of that life that doesn’t really feel like his own. He is referring mostly to his youth, starting with everything he was able to gather about his parents up to his twenties. Also, he acknowledges that some of it is purposefully buried in the past because it would be too painful to remember. Like the death of his brother, that he briefly mentions and with no details or the coldness of his mother that he chooses not to narrate, and says he forgives her. Here is an excerpt about the general feeling of the book:

“Je vais continuer d’égrener ces années, sans nostalgie mais d’une voix précipitée. Ce n’est pas ma faute si les mots se bousculent. Il faut faire vite, ou alors je n’en aurai plus le courage.”

If you can’t read French, I’ll do a very rough rendition: he basically says that he will continue going through those years without being nostalgic and talking fast because, if he doesn’t hurry up, he will run out of courage to write about them.

Every little detail we tell or don’t tell makes up who we are but also who we haven’t become. By omitting parts of the story we skip moments where we could’ve taken a different path. For Modiano, deciding not to tell the story of how his mother neglected him and his brother, and all the other ice-cold moments he spent with her, he decides to forgive her and creates his own image as a son that has overgrown his parents’ faults and instead of blaming them he takes his life into his own hands.

All in all, I think it’s a great exercise for a writer to write our own story, even if it’s not to publish it. Going through the exercise of writing our own story can become a revelation -being able to surprise ourselves with how much we’ve lived and how little we remember- or a simple exercise in the futile attempt to cling to moments that are no more. Dipping our pen in the ink of the past can be a way to escape it and make peace with it, like Modiano is doing, or a way to fix it in the paper as our own way to try to cling to moments that are all but gone but that make us who we are today as writers.