Back in the mid noughties on the Andrew Marr show, the bigraphy of Sir Christopher Meyer, UK ambassador to the United States during the Iraq War, was being discussed. His book was being serialised in one of the broadsheets, so when the newspapers were being reviewed, one commentator summarised his biography to Andrew Marr as 'why everything I ever did was right and how, if they had listened to me at the time, we wouldn't be in this mess'. That summary greatly amused me at the time, to the extent that I can recount it over a decade later, but since then, it's given me food for thought.
I am now making inroads to the sequel to I am a Stranger in a Strange Land. I have most of the plot set out on the whiteboard to the left of my desk here and I'm beginning to put pen to paper, or more precisely, finger to keyboard. The first book covered the late fifties and early sixties. The second will cover the seventies.
When writing narrative non-fiction, which, I'm faithfully assured, is my genre, one of the greatest temptations is to use your book as a vehicle for self-vindication, particularly if there's a biographical dimension to a piece of work - why whatever I did was right, how this person or that person should have listened to me and it would all have turned out better. Life isn't like that, so, good literature shouldn't be like that.
PIE is a neat acronym often used to describe why writers write - to persuade, to inform, to entertain. I believe all three of those facets are detracted from if a book is an exercise in self-vindication. I don't write that to virtue signal, but I wouldn't want to read someone else's attempt to frame their story in a purely favourable light, so it's reasonable to assume other readers will think similarly.
King Somolon wrote in Proverbs: Every way of a man is right in his own eyes. It can also be said that everyone is the protagonist in their own story. Clearly, anyone telling a story in the first person will frame the narrative from their viewpoint, but it doesn't work if you don't temper the writing with a little self-awareness and some generosity. The intention is to cast a light on a particular place at a particular time and allow the reader to live vicariously through that experience and to be informed in doing so.
That's the aspiration. It remains to be seen to what extent I achieve it.
Stay tuned.