A life in episodes |
For a decade, I’ve posted episodes of my memoir to Facebook. My readers correct my understanding of my past
by Thomas Söderqvist BIO
All images from the author’s archive.
is professor emeritus of history of medicine in the Department of Public Health and the founding director emeritus of the Medical Museion at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. His books include The Ecologists: From Merry Naturalists to Saviours of the Nation (1986) and Science as Autobiography: The Troubled Life of Niels Jerne (2003).
Edited byPam Weintraub
When I was about 15, alone in the flat one afternoon, I sneaked into my mother’s writing desk and found a small pocket calendar from 1946 pushed to the back of a drawer. I had grown up with my mother and her parents, not knowing who my biological father was, or how I had come about; the question was simply never asked. I turned, with a kind of dread, to the entries from nine months before I was born. In mid-March there was an ordinary note – ‘Party at the Academic Association’; she was training as a laboratory technician in Lund and liked the students’ company – and on the following day, in her hand, five words: ‘God, what have I done!’ I still remember the shock of standing there with the diary, half-guilty for trespassing on her private papers, and saying aloud, over and over: ‘That’s me – that’s me. What have you done? I’m a mistake.’
For half a century, the scene stayed as it was: fixed, private, finished. Then, about a decade ago, I posted it – to several hundred old acquaintances and strangers – on Facebook. I was in doubt; I felt faint embarrassment at making it public, but this was itself part of what I wanted to examine. Why was it shameful? What did the shame tell me about myself? And would saying it out loud, to strangers, do anything to drain the memory of its sting? The answers came from my readers, and one of them showed me something I could not have seen on my own.
Betty, a friend from the years we were postdocs together at Stanford, had heard me tell the story in person long ago, and she said the written version was missing something: my voice, the intonation and the look on my face. What look, I asked – had I played it for sympathy, had I ironised it? ‘Absolutely flat,’ she wrote. ‘No affect. A Max von Sydow deadpan. But yes, you ironised.’ I had not known that about myself: that I’d delivered the central wound of my origins with no expression at all and turned it into a dry joke.
That discovery, prompted by a reader’s response, was one of the first signs that writing one’s life in public could change how memory and narrative take shape. Writing an autobiography or memoir was traditionally a solitary undertaking. Authors worked through papers, memories and past events largely on their own, occasionally consulting family, friends or colleagues. Only after years of private work would the manuscript reach the public. Readers encountered the finished account, with little sense of the revisions, doubts and shifts in understanding that had shaped it.
Social media has fundamentally disrupted these conditions. By publishing sequential episodes of my life every few days, however, I have turned my autobiographical drafts into a continuing dialogue with my readers. Their real-time responses have made me reconsider how I understand my professional achievements, my personal relationships and myself. The question that drives it is not what happens when you put a memoir on Facebook, but a quieter one: what happens to self-image when it is formed in public?
As a professional historian of science, I have always been fascinated by biographies, autobiographies and memoirs – viewing them not merely as raw material for writing history, or even microhistories, but as distinct accounts of the past in their own right. Yet now, writing my life story piece by piece in public, I’ve begun to question whether a life can ever be framed, genuinely, as a coherent narrative – and whether that uncertainty might be a good thing.
I chose to focus on the personal context, developing an approach I termed existential scientific biography
I first tried my hand at full-scale life-writing in 1986, shortly after I finished my first book, on the history of Swedish ecology. Almost accidentally, I met with Niels Kaj Jerne, the Danish immunologist who had been awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine just two years earlier. ‘I have saved some papers,’ he casually remarked as we sat talking over a glass of wine in the kitchen of his large villa in southern France. We went up to the spacious attic room, where he parted the shutters and gestured towards the ancient Roman aqueduct, the Pont du Gard. Yet, I had no interest in antiquity; my attention was entirely arrested by the hundreds of grocery bags from the local supermarché lined up across the stone floor. They were stuffed to the brim with intimate letters, private diaries, raw laboratory protocols, rough article drafts, and decades of correspondence with colleagues around the world. He had kept virtually every scrap of paper that had passed through his hands from his youth onwards.
I can still vividly recall the thrill of exploring this unique archive. That afternoon set in motion a seven-year cooperation. At the outset, we discussed the possibility of weaving biography and autobiography together; we toyed with the idea of a book in a parallel format, with my biographical text on the left-hand pages and his personal recollections on the right – auto/biography as interlocution.
The vision of a side-by-side account soon faded, however, because Jerne – who was then in his mid-70s – lacked the stamina to draft his own memoir. Instead, through hundreds of hours of conversation, I managed to elicit a wealth of memory fragments that continuously enriched, and occasionally disrupted, my developing account of him.
Jerne’s unusual candour about his personal and intimate life led me, early on, to view his private and scientific realms as an integrated whole. Most of my colleagues in the history of science viewed biography as an ancilla historiae – a handmaid to history – and thus focused on the social and cultural context of researchers and their work. In contrast, I chose to focus on the personal context, developing an approach I termed existential scientific biography. As a lifelong admirer of Søren Kierkegaard, Jerne enthusiastically embraced this framework.
Part of the author’s own archive
Jerne died in 1994. By the time my book about him, Science as Autobiography, appeared in 2003, I had been appointed professor of the history of medicine at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. There, I hoped to focus on medical biography and autobiography. But I quickly became absorbed in transforming the university’s medical history museum into Medical Museion. My life-writing went on standby for several years.
It was only upon retiring 10 years ago that I found myself free to resume my fascination with life-writing, now with the roles reversed: after decades spent writing the lives of others, I would become my own subject. The decision was sparked one afternoon while I was clearing out my office at the museum. I suddenly realised how much material I had accumulated without having given it a second thought while I lived my life ‘forwards’, as Kierkegaard once put it.
My almost 50-year-long academic paper trail was a cornucopia of manuscripts, bundles of correspondence, lecture notes, meeting minutes and calendars. These were not in shopping bags on a stone floor, but in magazine files and stacks on office shelves. Yet the emotional impulse was the same as in Jerne’s attic room in Languedoc 30 years earlier, and I was seized by an irresistible urge to reconstruct my own life. It was high time to begin understanding life ‘backwards’. I was about to turn 70 and I realised – much like Socrates – that the unexamined life is not worth living. What had I achieved? How had I used my talents, and what mistakes had I made? Could I go to my grave without answering such questions?
Who, besides myself, could be interested in the answers? Unlike Jerne, I was not a well-known figure – but that was, paradoxically, a virtue. For me, the examined life mattered as a souci de soi, an act of self-care. I thought of the writing exercise as a present-day, healthy ageing counterpart to the late-medieval and early modern ars moriendi – the art of dying well.
I spent three years reading and taking notes, year by year, page by page
And for others, I thought, my autobiography might be of interest as an experiment and an example: I wanted my readers to focus on questions of genre........