The house in which Roberts first lived with Jim was divided between him and his ex-wife, so their sons could live with both of them; ideas of “the house as repaired body, as metamorphosing body” also inspired In the Red Kitchen, “which circled around haunting, breakages and secrets.”123 These themes—and the importance of the house—were carried over into Daughters of the House, written “out of a sudden need to think about where I came from (parents and politics), about the Second World War’s impact on civilians in occupied France, about collaboration.”124
Daughters of the House—with its clearer storytelling that Roberts attributes to her relationship with Jim—was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the WH Smith Literary Award. With the resulting increased sales and prize money, Roberts could afford to buy her own home, and she opted for a house in France, in order to reconnect with her French side, associated with her mother. Roberts’s mother had reacted angrily to her fiction, and their relationship had been difficult for many years, but around this time they “reached an oasis. We felt able to express our love for each other. We forgave each other. A miracle in the desert.”125
Roberts would come to terms with the trauma of another familial relationship—that with her father—staying in the childhood home in France after the death of her aunt, haunted by “a projection of old childhood fears and desires.”126 She explains,
What came up for me, the ghoul that haunted me . . . was the strong feelings I’d had in this house for my father. At puberty, aged ten, I was madly in love with him, flirted with him, competed with my mother for his attention. I didn’t know this was normal, that little girls routinely fall in love with their dads. Catholicism taught that sex before marriage was wicked. Sexual feelings in a child of ten were therefore of course very wicked indeed, and sexual feelings for my father were wickedest of all.127
Impossible Saints, written shortly before her father died, was the novel through which Roberts grappled with the complexities of the father-daughter relationship, and its guise in patriarchal religion. The main narrative, of Josephine, features a father-daughter relationship with hints of incestuous desires, but it is in the short narratives of a multitude of women saints that “we get various ways in which the daughter fights her father, loves him, flirts with him, gets raped by him.”128 Roberts felt that Impossible Saints was a “breakthrough novel”129 not only in terms of her father, but also as regards religion. Her works of fiction that followed—Fair Exchange, The Looking Glass, Playing Sardines, The Mistressclass and Reader I Married Him—circled around her interests in the importance of the material—of sex, food and place—and women as writers and historical agents, but in a lighter way than in her earlier work.
This neat narrative of Michèle Roberts’s life story is based mostly on her memoir Paper Houses, but could also have been pieced together by information from her interviews and non-fiction writing, which augment the tale told in Paper Houses. It ends at a certain point—around the writing of Impossible Saints—although a little information about the years since are given on the last page, on which Roberts reveals that, after seventeen years together, her marriage to Jim had ended. Even though I already knew that, as the reader of this memoir I encountered the ending of this story with a jolt of sadness for its narrator.
Yet the narrator is not Michèle Roberts the partner, friend, daughter, sibling, step-mother, aunt—at least not the one known by her lovers, friends or family—it is Michèle-Roberts-the-writer, as disclosed to her readers. It is a fiction, but Roberts is well aware of that. She recognizes the “human need to make a shape for the story that we all have . . . autobiography and biography are not very different from fiction: similar impulses and similar stylistic devices are there to make a beautiful or truthful shape.”130 Roberts is also aware of the dangers of unified narratives told in one, omniscient voice. She had deliberately chosen to write novels that experimented with multiple perspectives and fragmented narratives—“plaiting, . . . interweaving down-to-earth voices rather than up-in-the sky ones”—associating omniscient narrators with God, fathers, the Pope. As such, Paper Houses is her only novel-length work which employs a single, ‘reliable’ narrator telling a straightforward narrative.
In the introduction, Roberts reflects on the process of writing her memoir, a fictionalized account of a person and a life, pieced together from the notebooks she wrote at the time: “[w]hen I spread them out on the floor of the room where I write they look like the multi-colored pavement of a piazza. This memoir is like fiction, in as much as I have shaped and edited it, but it is as truthful as I can make it, honouring both facts and the way I saw them at the time.”131 As the editor and shaper of the narrative, she chose, “[o]ut of consideration for others’ privacy,” to omit some “characters” and to “censor some episodes”132—but she recognizes that this is not the only sense in which she is “in charge” of the narrative: “[w]riting this memoir joins up all the scattered bits of me, makes them continuous, gives me a conscious self existing in history . . . Out of what often felt at the time like muddle and mess I subsequently make this memoir, this story.”133 Roberts images the artifice of memoir in terms of her enjoyment of exploring and wandering a city’s streets (of which Paper Houses contains many vivid descriptions): “[m]y narrative in one sense goes in a straight line, chronologically, charting my rake’s progress, but in another sense is a flâneur. It circles around recurrent images and themes, runs back and forth between inner and outer worlds.”134 Thus Roberts’s being “in charge” of the narrative is not the same as having complete control over it: “[y]ou become part of a flow and dance of words. You forget yourself and just get on with writing, just as, walking in the city, you can dissolve into the crowd, simply float, listen, look.”135
Writing her autobiography, “the flâneur enjoys being enticed down side streets,”136 both figuratively and literally. This relates to the importance of place, materiality and home in Roberts’s life-writing (indeed, all her work). The house is a symbol of redemption, but it is not the physical house her memoir is named after, but that which gave her security, meaning and identity during the years of wandering: “[m]y diary was a room of my own in which I could speak and act as I liked. Reading created me a temporary house, spun a cocoon around me.”137 This is carried forward into the future; the final sentence of Paper Houses: “[w]riting goes on too: I keep on building my paper house; my chrysalis.”138
Michèle Roberts’s Life-Writing as Redemptive
For Michèle Roberts writing is home; it is also an alternative vocation. She frequently draws an analogy between her childhood desire to become a nun, and her vocation as a writer, which entails discipline and sacrifice, but has great spiritual reward: “writing is a bit like waiting on God . . . trusting in the darkness, opening yourself up to what comes, being empty . . . I’ve invented my own version of the convent, becoming a writer.”139 This, the connection between writers and saints and Roberts’s interest in medieval literature, means that
