The Things That Made Me · 16 Practices & 7 Meditations

There is a drawer. In it are things that are not valuable and are not rubbish, and you have moved house with them more than once. A ring nobody wears. One baby shoe. A cup with a chip in it that you would not let anybody drink from. Every one is there because of a story, and the story exists only in your head. An object without its story is just an old thing, and old things get thrown away in an afternoon by somebody in a hurry. So you use the method that already works, which is the one museums use. Ten objects. You learn what tombstone data is and why the flat factual block comes before any feeling. You give each object an accession number, which sounds absurd until you do it and find it changes how you see the whole drawer. You write provenance as a chain of hands and you mark the gaps rather than smoothing them, because a missing decade is usually a war or a theft or a family that stopped speaking. Then you write the label. Fifty words, ten times. No poignant, no treasured, no beloved. There is a weak example and a strong one in here and the difference between them will teach you more about writing than any amount of encouragement. There is a section on how to actually photograph an object, which most people cannot. And one on conservation that is mostly a list of things not to do, because most family objects are not lost, they are destroyed slowly at home by people trying to look after them. Do not clean it. The wear is the biography. Four of the ten are difficult on purpose, including the object you would be embarrassed to include and the object that is missing, which is catalogued in full with the space for the photograph left blank. Sixteen steps. It ends with an evening, three people at a table, and one question about who you have actually been writing all this for.