I am not my own subject. But now I am not so sure

I began a cursory study of memoirs and was irritated to find that Gore Vidal had already bagged Palimpsest, a title I had been toying with. But as I grumpily leafed through the book I discovered that Vidal had had his own qualms about the genre. In fact he claims in the introduction that he had never previously entertained the idea of writing a memoir because he did not consider himself his own subject, but now he was not so sure.

From Brought to Book, Me Neither

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Event/Horizon

Event/Horizon is a postwar coming-of-age story, in a broadly comic mode, but touching on darker aspects of the period, as well as on love, loss, and the pains of growing up. Set in Cambridge in 1974, it interweaves aperçus of academic life with those of the local poetry scene, theatre life, and the era’s counter-culture, — rock music, drugs, and casual sex — with all of which its hero, would-be poet Steve Percival, finds himself having to grapple, in his quest for love, enlightenment and artistic fulfilment. Apart from Event/Horizon Eamonn Vincent has published a memoir of the 1970s and 1980s Me Neither , two volumes of poetry Only More So and Even More So and more recently Who Was Nightshade? , a comic spy thriller set in the 1960s. All titles are available from Arbuthnot Books. Buy Event/Horizon on Amazon.

Bristol Lodekka

I was fairly doubtful about this plan. What if we passed an inspector en route which was far from improbable at that time of morning. Speedy thought for a bit and then suggested that we avoid the city centre altogether. He reasoned that an inspector would have no reason to be on duty on The Backs for example. He sketched out the route we would take and then we’d resume our schedule at Mitcham’s Corner. I wasn’t even sure that there was enough clearance for a double-decker bus on the route he was suggesting but I could see that the longer we debated the issue the later we were likely to be. No doubt my lack of moral fibre was connected to the monumental hang-over I was nursing so I agreed weakly, put up the Not In Service sign and hid myself in the back of the bus. A Bristol Lodekka LFS 45 is faster than a Morrison Electricar milk float, but not much. Despite that fact Speedy managed to coax an impressive performance from the lumbering beast and we made up most of the time lost due to m...

Eamonn Vincent's books published by Arbuthnot Books

When I published my memoir ' Me Neither ' in 2018 I started a blog in the hope of drawing attention to it. Ha! As if. Even then no one wanted yet another blog or website or tweets about your latest book. The focus had already moved on to Instagram and Pinterest, both studiously averse to textual matter. Now even those sites are old hat and all the action has moved to TikTok and, for the purposes of promoting books, to its offshoot BookTok. Stranger things have been known to happen, but somehow I doubt that Gen Z influencers are on the whole enthusing about Boomer memoirs devoted to the world of work in the 1970s and 1980s. After a few posts I abandoned the blog and let my little book make its own way through the world. In the absence of any publicity or reviews in the public prints, sales were distinctly modest. I was not surprised, but it was hard not to feel a little disheartened. Perhaps memoir was not my forte. What about writing a novel instead? Four years later I seem ...

Eamonn Vincent

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