The Dyers Tale

DYER

Obviously I am the world’s leading authority on the subject matter of this book, which is my childhood and adolescence. But with any kind of writing, it’s always about the detail. There were scenes and details that, for whatever reason, often no reason at all, have remained very vivid in my memory. I don’t know why—they weren’t special moments, but they lodged in my mind. In their mysterious way they were my “spots of time,” as Wordsworth calls them in The Prelude. But whereas he offers an explanation of their significance—you know, “This efficacious spirit chiefly lurks …”—I’ve not been able to determine their significance beyond the fact of their tenacity and, on that basis, I happily submitted to their insistence, their quiet lobbying, on the right to be admitted. Also, when I was about seventeen or eighteen and, through reading, became interested in trying to write, I had nothing to write about but my adolescent and family life, and I kept those pages. The writing was of zero literary value, of course, but it comprised a wonderful archive of details I could use.

INTERVIEWER

Were there other kinds of research or self-research involved?

DYER

I never think of anything I do as involving research. It always feels to me like having a hobby. I know a great deal about Bob Dylan, for example, because I’m interested in Bob Dylan, but I don’t do research on Dylan. The other thing is that it has never been easier to write an autobiography or to write about recent history—pictures of every little thing you’ve ever owned are on the internet. I’m an inept user of the internet, but I was amazed at the amount of data about the clutter of my life—of my g-g-generation, as the Who put it—preserved in Cyberia. Now, what none of this can do—this virtual prop cupboard—is give us narrative. That’s provided by people and by the emergence of an individual consciousness at a particular moment of history—moment in, this instance, in the extended sense of the period from 1958 to 1977.

INTERVIEWER

There’s quite a bit in the book on your collecting of objects as a child and a teenager—Action Men, model airplanes, bubblegum cards, records. How did you think about these objects, as tools for memory but also as things that might be put literally in the book?

DYER

The objects are part of a larger universal specificity, as it were. It was related to Ernaux’s project in The Years, where there’s a lot of information about various gadgets that became available at defining moments for her generation. The mistake some memoirists make is to write “We would go down to the shops,” or “We would go for walks.” It’s all generalized. But the continuity has to be particularized, and the objects in this book are all tied to particular moments. It’s about substantiating a time and place. In The Age of Innocence, for example, you hear all about the furnishings of a room, but something is always happening in that room, and the stuff happening is complex human and economic interaction. What’s happening in my book—in my rooms—is more self-centered, but I am the locus of social and economic forces. Sticking with toys for a moment, my fondness for inventory is such that my American editor Alex Star said, “I’ve had enough of all these toys, can’t we move on to the human relationships?” And I said, No, you don’t understand, because you have brothers and sisters. But if you’re an only child, it’s things that you have relationships with.