In the preface to his pointedly titled Unreliable Memoirs, critic Clive James laid out his approach to writing about oneself:

Most first novels are disguised autobiographies. This autobiography is a disguised novel. . . . So really the whole affair is a figment got up to sound like truth. All you can be sure of is one thing: careful as I have been to spare other people’s feelings, I have been even more careful not to spare my own. Up, that is, of course, to a point…

You want to be honest with the reader. That’s where the good stuff is. But at the same time, remember to hold things back. That’s where the artistry is. It’s a memoir, not therapy.

The late Clive James was a cultural student of multivarious appetites and great enthusiasms. All the great critics are (avoid the ones with too narrow an idea of what is good or worthwhile; they don’t enjoy what they do). He could also turn a mean phrase. For instance:

My idea of a fine wine was one that merely stained your teeth without stripping the enamel…

Or there is always:

All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light. There was a time when I got hot under the collar if the critics said I had nothing new to say. Now I realise that they had a point. My field is the self-evident. Everything I say is obvious, although I like to think that some of the obvious things I have said were not so obvious until I said them…

But in some of his best work, James talked about what really matters in all the culture we consume.

This might be best expressed in his epic poem (yes, he did verse, too) “The River in the Sky“:

Books are the anchors /
Left by the ships that rot away…

That’s the task in front of all of us. How to write something that reminds us of what was.

Or what could be.