Notes on Reading, Alan Bennett - "A Life Like Other People's"

 Close reading family memoir

- the psyche and the stage

In this blog series, I want to share a few writings from my time at university. For the module, Telling Lives, we read selected family memoirs and wrote short blogs on our interpretations. Each piece was written along a certain theme, with the aim of highlighting a unique viewing lens for the text.

Studying English in Leeds, it was apt that we read Armley’s Alan Bennett. A Life Like Other People’s conveys a difficult upbringing, swaddled in English politeness. Like many playwrights, Bennett’s history informs the drama he writes, but goes beyond just drawing inspiration. In the process of his work, he displaces traumatic events from the psyche on to the stage, and creates a coping mechanism. 

Alan Bennett, A Life Like Other People’s (London: Faber, 2009):

Alan Bennett describes ‘our lives’ as ‘our drama[s]’ (p. 155). In his memoir, he highlights how his family’s lives inform the dramas he writes. For example, he describes an instance with his parents and writes, ‘Years later I put this in my only play about madness’ (p. 61). This displacement of reality into drama makes traumatic events manageable. He calls his grandfather’s suicide the ‘biggest drama’ that happened to his aunties (p. 136). This unfeeling term, ‘drama’, creates distance from the event. This distance allows the indirect processing of trauma. Thus, the term ‘drama’ highlights how his writing can function as catharsis.