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One Life is Kate Grenville’s account of the life of Nance Gee, her mother. The project began when she found the fragments of her mother’s own attempts at autobiography and put them alongside the hours of interviews she recorded with her before she died in 2002. She ended up going far beyond these primary sources to write a book which would have wider appeal than the family. As I listened to the book, I found myself curious about the writing of it. I was grateful to find Grenville give this insight on her website:
There were several problems. One was the cautious biographical voice of the early drafts: writing full of things like “she probably thought” and “she must have felt”. In the absence of definite knowledge, a biographer is stuck with that caution, but it saps the energy of the writing and the vividness of the moments. Another problem was that in these drafts, two voices were competing to tell the story: Mum’s voice, quoted verbatim, and my own, filling in the gaps. …
The book that’s now between covers is my attempt to find a path between all these obstacles. My mother’s voice appears both nowhere and everywhere: the verbatim voice has gone but phrases and often whole sentences from her memoirs appear on every page, almost in every paragraph. Where it enriches the texture of her story, I’ve added material that I found in research. …
This book, then, isn’t a biography or a memoir. It isn’t history, nor is it fiction. It has elements of all of these without being any of them. Like most of the tales we tell ourselves and each other, it’s that compendious and loose-limbed thing: a story.
Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth 