Establishing Literary Authority: A Two-Way Process

Abstract

I am Jo. I am a Forgotten Australian and a member of Care Leavers Network Australia. As a child I had no authority over my own life but was subject to the authority of others. When I was three and a half years of age I was placed in an institution. Five years later, I went from the orphanage into foster ‘care’. At both these places I suffered hardship and abuse, and felt the effects of displacement and dispossession. As an adult, through reflection and maturity I can regain authority. My experience gives me the authority to write about the damaging childhood. All this counts for nothing if I cannot convey the child’s agony and the horror of the situation to the reader; it is not enough to merely tell my story. The reflective voice in memoir and autobiography brings insight and understanding. Then there is the further step for the writer which in writing with authority means gaining the reader’s attention and trust. David McCooey says that ‘ “the production of truth and authority” ...is not so much an exercise in capturing the self as capturing the reader’; in autobiography ‘the notion of authority suggests a public domain within which to be authoritative.’ In writing about my childhood in a creative memoir, with self-reflection and the skill to create an imaginative landscape, I rely both on my authority over my experience and the more elusive authority of the literary author.