Imane Kurdi This week I heard of a fantastic initiative taken by a hospital in France to hire a family biographer for patients in their oncology department. The experiment in the Hospital of Chartres started five years ago and has been a tremendous success. Cancer patients get the opportunity to have hourly sessions with a biographer who writes down their stories. These sessions are then transformed into a beautifully produced book that patients can give to their families and loved ones. The idea is that when people are diagnosed with a serious illness and face the prospect that their lives might soon come to an end, they often feel the need to look back on their lives. Sometimes there is the wish to reveal secrets or to unburden guilt. The sessions with a biographer give them the chance to tell their story in their own words no holds barred, to share and transmit to those they love who they are, what they have done, and where they have come from. Moreover, the real benefit is that it gives cancer patients a new project to work on at a crucial time in their lives. The focus of their attention becomes not their illness but the exercise of putting down their memories on paper, and for a short while at least they are not defined by their illness. The resulting book is part of their heritage, something precious they can leave to their families. It is all part of a growing trend for private biographies. In France alone, there are now an estimated 1200 private biographers who earn their living by writing the stories of ordinary people. These books are generally not published in the normal sense, they are not made available for sale or for the wider public, and there is nothing commercial about them. Most often they represent a wish to leave behind a written trace of a life well lived. Rather than write their own account, clients entrust their stories to a professional, both for the quality of the writing and to obtain a professionally produced book. Often it is a gift for grandchildren who want to know the stories they've never been told. The cost varies, and indeed there are different approaches to family biographies. At one end of the scale you have something that is to some extent a vanity project: People who wish to produce a flattering and glossy life story. These are often entrepreneurs and professionals who pay for what is sadly not much more than a public relations exercise, something that they can use to give them a more brightly polished image. But at the other end of the scale, you find something much more touching. Ordinary people telling ordinary lives in simple, honest terms. The wish is to tell the truth, and the truth is often not ordinary at all but quite extraordinary. There is a common adage that each of us has a story to tell and this puts the adage into practice. These private biographers work closely with their clients, they note down their stories session by session, charging for their time and not for the finished book. Clients set the pace, they make appointments session by session; sometimes these can be separated by weeks or months and sometimes they are regular weekly sessions. It gives clients the freedom to come when they can afford it – for often these are people from modest backgrounds – or when they feel the need, until the story is told and the book can be produced. In some respects this way of working, in its search for self-knowledge, resembles therapy sessions but it is a mistake to think that this is some form of therapy or psychoanalysis. The biographer listens, notes and uses the words of the client to produce something that is coherent as a story to read. Psychologists do an altogether different job. One works with stories, the other with emotions and traumas. One simply receives and reproduces, the other empowers change and understanding. There are also biographers who look for people with interesting lives to write. I met someone last week who was approached by such a biographer. This again reflects the idea that ordinary people have extraordinary stories to tell, but in this case the aim is to publish the book for sale. Increasingly publishers are interested in stories from a world gone by. Perhaps, at the end of the day, we all feel the need to be saved from oblivion. In a world where people increasingly feel the need to record their every moment in photographs and posts online, these life stories give us anchors, they remind us of where we have come from, and they trace the course of history in the most intimate and poignant manner possible. How often have I found myself wishing that my mother or my father – God rest their souls – had had the time to tell us their stories before they died; they are forever lost now. How wonderful that others are being given the chance to save their personal heritage for posterity. — Imane Kurdi is a Saudi writer on European affairs. She can be reached at [email protected]
