I’ve started a memoir club – in memory of Jeremy

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Catriona Olding has narrated this article for you to listen to.

Molly MacCarthy launched the Bloomsbury Memoir Club in the spring of 1920 with two aims. The first was to bring together the old Bloomsbury set who’d been dissipated by the first world war and the second was to encourage her dilatory husband, Desmond, to write his memoir. She was successful in the first but not the second. The original club was composed of old friends and family members: the MacCarthys, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa and Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry and John Maynard Keynes. The aim was ‘serious but also to amuse’. There were few rules, ‘one of which was that no one should be affronted by anything read or said in the Club’.

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For years I tried to get a small memoir club going down here in Provence; winters can be cold, dark and lonely. I was hoping to encourage Jeremy to write, if not the next literary comic novel – he gave up on that seven years or so before he died – then a memoir at least. But he was writing 800 words a week and having failed to write a memoir in his youth after spending a third of the publisher’s advance, he was loath to try again.

Not long after he died in May 2023 I asked a few friends – Monica and André, the foreign correspondent, his wife Mel and a neighbour, Geoffrey – if they’d be interested in starting a memoir club. The first meeting was on 9 February 2024 – what would’ve been Jeremy’s 67th birthday.