On the Uptown Memoir

In the past several weeks, five new people subscribed to my Substack, although I’ve not written here since March 12. I felt guilty. Here I was, flouting the most basic of internet rules – you gotta deliver content – and still, a few people were interested enough in what I have written and might still write to hit the subscribe button. So here I now am, with apologies for the break in transmission. I cannot promise it will not recur.

My last post was about Arundhati Roy’s courage as the Iran war began, and I slipped in the writing of – well, maybe the revising of – a memoir I’ve been working on since 2014. I called it Uptown Memoir. Now it’s called Peter McCaulay’s Daughter. So it’s true that part of the reason for the Substack void has been I’ve had my head down, writing my own life. And I’ve enjoyed it – what’s more interesting to each of us than ourselves, right? I’m well aware that the world hardly needs another memoir, unless the writer has done or experienced something extraordinary. I make no such claim. So I set myself free to write a book length work, of interest to no one except perhaps my own family, my son in particular. Once again, I promised myself I would not seek publication. I could therefore tell the truth, describe things I am not proud of, try to understand what, if anything, a single life means. And write about the places my family lived.

There are many questions I wish I could have asked my own parents, grandparents and even my ancestors, so at least, I thought, if I write my life, take it up to Copy Shop, bind it, and put it in my trunk, my son will have some answers, should he choose to ask the questions. No one else need read it. To my sisters (who roll their eyes), I call it the Non Book.

It’s been fun, these weeks. No need to impose the requirements of fiction, believability, character, plot, voice. My voice, my point of view. This happened, that happened. Since most people written about are dead, no one to fact check. I tried, though. Due to all the ancestral research I’ve done, I have a lot of facts contained in public records, wills, documents, newspapers, photographs.

Sans Souci, overlooking St Ann’s Bay. My grandparents’ house, where my father grew up. Destroyed by the 1944 hurricane.

Now I’m at the stage where throughout the Non Manuscript there are highlighted marks like this: xxx. It means something is missing and I have to run it down. A birthdate. A surname. Information about a place. There are 26 of those xxx marks. And the ending trails off – because here I am, in this precise moment, not yet dead. New things could happen.

I do want to finish the Non Book, Uptown Memoir, whatever, about what it was like being a light skinned Jamaican with an enslavement ancestry, born here in the 1950s to an upper middle class family. I know how easy it is to fail to finish any piece of writing, I’ve done it a lot. I’m gonna finish this one. Definitely.

Did I mention I sent out the first chapter to a journal and it was accepted? I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say which particular one yet.

My sisters are right to roll their eyes.