Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

"And yet of all the books on the list, Surprised by Joy is the one that on the surface seems to be the most straightforward memoir: it starts with ‘I was born here’ and says ‘My mother died on this day…’ and ‘I went to school here and it was like this’ et cetera et cetera… But I think, again, this book is more about thoughts than about straight experience. He starts by telling us that this is a book about his conversion from atheism to Christianity – in fact, the friend who first lent me the book was very concerned that I wouldn’t like it because of that – but to me, that’s not really what the book is about. It’s more about a man tracing back his mind. And he was trying very hard, I think, not to use the negative space, but rather to stick to the line and follow the development of his mind and his thought. If you read his letters you realise how many strong personal feelings Lewis had – about his father, for example, who never visited him after he was injured in the First World War. This episode is only lightly touched in Surprised by Joy , but in the letters you can see clearly that he would never recover from the experience, from that extreme resentment. But the letters were written in the moment when he experienced strong emotions, whereas in Surprised by Joy he is looking back to a time 24 years earlier and choosing to capture only what is truly important to him then, at the time of writing. And I think what is most important to him is to look at the development of his mind. He says at one point – and I’m paraphrasing – ‘If you are 14 and you haven’t developed a good habit of thinking, you probably won’t become a thinking person.’ So you can see how important the idea is to him. He says something about how falling in love with an author is different to agreeing with an author. I would say, in this case, I agree with the author – he defines joy in a way that I can connect with. He makes several other definitions in the book that I find very helpful, too. For example, he makes the distinction between selfishness and self-centredness. A selfish person actually can give other people joy because he tends to find the best for himself, and can then give this to others; with a self-centred person, on the other hand, it’s all about their ego so they can’t see beyond themselves enough to be able to give anyone joy. Lewis redefined many such things, and, when reading him I mostly agree with his definitions. But I also question him and, through questioning him, start to find my own way of defining things. I actually marked that precise passage in my reading. I think writers tend to think that the book they are writing is their friend, too, their closest friend. But sometimes the book is not a simple alter-ego. Sometimes, rather, the book is a place for the writer to disagree with oneself, to argue and debate things with oneself. That is the whole point of the anti-memoir – you’re not writing to agree with yourself, you’re not writing to advertise a good relationship between yourself and your memoir. I’m actually writing to show you, the reader, how much I disagree with myself. “ Sometimes the book is a place for the writer to disagree with oneself, to argue and debate things with oneself. That is the whole point of the anti-memoir ” There’s another passage I underlined in Lewis’s book, when he’s talking about how he once took a long walk in the misty countryside with a friend, and how he now finds himself remembering that old friend and their conversation from many years ago. It all comes back to him, he says, so that remembering the first walk is, in a way, enough to make him feel again. So he says: ‘True it was desire and not possession. But then what I had felt on the walk had also been desire, and only possession in so far as that kind of desire is itself desirable, it is the fullest possession we can know on earth; or rather, because the very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting. There, to have is to want and to want is to have.’ That to me is the centre of this book. To have is to want and to want is to have. It feels like an answer of some kind, to an unspecified question. But it’s not really an answer. Many memoirs seem to suggest they have answers to questions – the reader’s as well as the writer’s own – but Lewis’s is a non-answer. I said this to someone recently and they looked at me like they didn’t know what I was talking about! It’s hard to explain, but I guess what I’m saying is that anti-memoirs are not about offering answers, but that sometimes by offering us something like this idea, or non-answer, that ‘To have is to want and to want is to have’, it retroactively makes us – again, both reader and writer – pose a question. Exactly– this is a book that I often return to. Every time I read it again I feel something new but it’s a feeling I can’t articulate. I cannot find the right words to respond to it. That’s very funny – and also very true."