Designs for the Memory Palace: The Research Behind Life Writing by Jen Calleja

Jen Calleja is the Life Writing judge for the 2026 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize. In this essay, she shares the inspiring roadmap that led to the creation of her memoir, Fair: The Life-Art of Translation, and the importance of embarking on a wide-ranging, deep, and unique research journey for creating your own work of life writing.

The 2026 Prize is open for submissions until 30 June 2026. Submit your work here.

The concept of doing research for a short or long-form piece of life writing might sound strange or unnecessary. There can be a belief that the event or life story will ‘speak for itself’, and that its purpose, possible emotional resonances, and significance will come across as a matter of course.

The vessel or shell for experiences and events – the voice, tone, atmosphere, and world created – is truly what makes them feel meaningful for a reader. A writer can make the smallest occurrence feel suspenseful and vitally important, or transform and reframe an objectively tragic experience into something absurd or even humorous, depending on the storytelling methods. If, however, the writer overrelies on the ‘shorthand’ of declaring their greatest achievement, love, or loss, the event may come across as purely flat information that conjures no images or emotional resonance. The experiences are material, but there are endless possibilities for what you choose to do with them.

If this all sounds like the stuff of fiction writing, that’s because it is — life writing takes as much active invention as fiction if it’s to become more than a report of events for posterity. When telling an autobiographical story – such as in a journalistic long read, where the writer presents facts while adhering to chronology – getting the story across in an informative and clear way is likely the priority. There might be a consistent voice and style, but the work’s truthfulness is a given.

Creating a piece of memoir or life writing, however, shifts priorities. The main aim becomes not to inform but to build tension and suspense — to complicate the information or linger on the quieter aspects. You might need to play with the order of what happened to replicate the nature of memory, or to show that all moments are crucial in life, not just stepping stones to a ‘big event’. If the memoir falls on the farther end of experimental, it might call into question the idea of ‘voice’, the truthfulness of the ‘story’, and the ways experience is narrativised into a clean arc.

This is where research comes in: it gives you the scaffolds that could help you build a dynamic piece of life writing. 

My research influenced the creation of my own memoir, Fair: The Life-Art of Translation, in many ways, some of which remained clear to me throughout the process, while other parts became buried over time, or were perhaps never clear to me at all. Here, I set out a few – but not all – throughways that led from the research to the book. 

Working Practices

I knew right from the beginning that I was attempting to write a vocational memoir – a memoir about a life dedicated to a specific working practice – and specifically a translator memoir.

Both A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa and This Little Art by Kate Briggs had come out very recently when I started writing Fair, and are considered (by myself and other translators) as two of the best books on what it means to undertake the work of translation from a very human, embodied perspective. They guided me in making sure I spoke about the real, everyday lived experience of being a translator; whenever I strayed too much into the theoretical, I returned to the body of the translator, their working and living space, and the people around them.

Vulnerability, fallibility, and shame were part of what I was grappling with in Fair. I tried to name all my embarrassing moments – mistakes, over-shooting, fawning over authors I’d translated – because I could see in early drafts that I was curating the ‘best version’ of myself. This can be the treachery of an early draft, before you realise that being a flawed human and showing one’s humanity are the real reasons people read life writing, no matter what it’s about. Like Ní Ghríofa and Briggs, I was as open as possible while remaining kind to myself when narrating these ‘flaws’, in the hope that others (translators and readers in general) would be kind to themselves too.

A memoir is always incomplete

While these two books acted as touchstones in my writing process, I looked at a whole wealth of vocational memoirs to see what different aspects of their working lives people focused on. These included a memoir about becoming a clown (clowns eventually ended up having cameos in Fair), and another about becoming a steeplechaser. Rather than only looking at the specific subject or experience you’re exploring in your writing, it can be useful to go broad to see what hasn’t yet been explored in your particular niche.

A Working-Class-Person-Becoming-and-Being-an-Artist Memoir

Through research, I realised quite far into writing Fair that I was creating another specific kind of memoir, one that could be hyphenated with the translator memoir: a working-class-person-becoming-and-being-an-artist memoir. It’s a niche genre combined with another niche genre. In my second phase of research, I then actively sought out vocational memoirs by working-class creative practitioners.

The support I found was literary, in terms of language, content, and style, but also moral. It meant a surprising amount to me that Susan Finlay referred to people as ‘posh’, ‘rich’, and ‘wealthy’ in The Lives of the Artists – that is, identifying herself outside of the hegemonic class – and explained the ways she was gaslit in her dealings with the publishing industry. At the beginning of her book written for emerging actors, An Actor’s Alphabet: An A to Z of Some Stuff I’ve Learnt and Some Stuff I’m Still Learning, actress and campaigner Julie Hesmondhalgh pronounces: ‘I am a state-educated socialist and trade unionist, an intersectional feminist and activist from a working-class northern background and with a strong Lancashire accent’, and includes ‘Class, Casting and Cultural Capital’ and ‘Equality in Education’ as sections of her A to Z for making it as an actor. Both these books encouraged me to not only include but also speak very openly about my own experiences within the publishing industry as someone from a working-class background. Without them, I might not have realised that there were others speaking out about classism in the arts, and found the courage to do the same within my own field.

Being a flawed human and showing one’s humanity are the real reasons people read life writing

In Bernadine Evaristo’s Manifesto: On Never Giving Up, she discusses transitioning from one class to another – or at least trying to mask her class – specifically through changing her way of speaking. This encouraged me to include my own experiences of class straddling, likewise in terms of markers like speech. In Manifesto, Evaristo also talks about how her father’s accent influenced her writing even though he didn’t teach her and her siblings his language, Yoruba. This prompted me to explore the absence of my own father’s language, Maltese, in my upbringing and, later, in my chosen career of translation.

Looking beyond writing about translation to books about other creative practices proved more important than sticking solely with translator memoirs. I ended up researching and quoting a lot from artists, actors, and other creators like chefs and musicians. My research had shown how all creative vocations are connected in their processes, but also in their issues of including and embracing those from backgrounds like mine. I certainly hadn’t expected a book by a Coronation Street actor would go into my research, but by remaining open, I found something incredibly useful.

Prickly Pears, Haunted Houses 

My ‘fair’ is a zone of felt experience, a chamber of affect reflecting and projecting my emotions for the reader to take on. Claustrophobic broom cupboards and boats, sinkholes, prickly pears, haunted houses, a miniature railway shunting into a dead end, the general slapdash nature of the place — each represents the mood and state of mind of the version of ‘Jen Calleja’ in Fair acting as tour guide within the imaginary book fair/art fair/fun fair I’ve placed a chunk of my life inside.

In my earlier drafts, however, I was too tentative and didn’t make the most of my ruse of a fictional space. I knew that I wanted to create some kind of building in which to house my curated set of experiences, like a memory palace that I could share with my readers. I originally thought of a tower in which the reader could take the lift up and down, but I couldn’t really figure out what this added to the book. The rooms of the memory palace often felt empty, echoey, and under-furnished — no more than a novelty backdrop for recounted anecdotes.

My research had shown how all creative vocations are connected in their processes

Then I read Margo Jefferson’s Constructing a Nervous System. Her 2022 memoir opens in an imaginary theatre space, setting the scene for the performative and theatrical book to follow. It made me have an epiphany: I wanted my experiences to be in spaces that felt like theatrical sets the reader could enter, and that I could have complete control over — from the ‘set’, to the ‘props’, to the ‘lights’, even atmospheric elements like temperature and fake rain. I realised that I could do whatever I wanted; I could bend the text however I needed to.

The voice I was using in my earlier drafts was identical to the one I already used in my personal columns about literary translation. This meant I wasn't stretching my voice to adapt to the theatricality of the space I was building in my memoir. I couldn’t just ‘get away’ with writing in the same voice I had in my more essayistic writing. The further I rewrote Fair, the more that ‘column’ voice jarred on the page, constricting my ability to write in an embodied, experiential, and entertaining way. In Jefferson’s book, the voice is seriously playful: it reads like that of a well-respected cultural critic with her delighted child self always present. I took something similar from Charlie Fox’s essay collection, This Young Monster — the critic shouldn’t ever forget that they were once a child, and that their interests in art and culture stem from their childhood. One of my favourite essays in this collection is about the figure of ‘the Beast’ in fairytales and visual culture. It’s told from the perspective of a version of Fox that oscillates somewhere between his adult self and his child self — he sets the essay in his childhood bedroom and he’s speaking not to the reader, but directly to the Beast, who’s in the room with him. He locates his deep cultural criticism within a kid’s room and in dialogue with a mythological creature, and this creates a voice and style that achieves criticism with heart that doesn’t deny one’s past, childish self. Reading and re-reading both writers allowed me to add a dimension to the theatrical space in my own book — a voice that was persuasive but silly, looking both at current arguments in literary translation while holding on to the curiosity and playfulness of childhood and the foundational experiences that have led me here.

I wanted my experiences to be in spaces that felt like theatrical sets the reader could enter

I initially planned for Fair to be chronological but then found that too restrictive; it locked me into a traditional arc, forcing me to build up to ‘meaningful’ moments and head towards an inevitable ‘conclusion’. Jefferson’s book was useful here again. Her sections switch voice, subject, and tone, and time and space shift as well. The overall effect is propulsive. Jefferson describes her process of finding her book’s form in a previous interview in Granta:  

‘The book needed momentum, but not a single, driven one: I need plurality and variety. I wanted to resist a steady, clearly unifying narrative. Momentum as contradiction, as mood swings, as daydreaming (which we always do when reading). More formally, momentum as assemblage, collage, even mosaic in sections. […] I kept testing different sequences and shapes. Digression, monologue, changes of register, pauses that could be calming or disturbing.’

This made me think of each section of my memoir as a miniature world with its own textures and intentions, and to order the sections to create a dynamic reading experience: highs and lows, warm and cold moments, mini explosions, sinking, tripping, spinning … all to keep the book moving without an arc. Though very different books, I was influenced again by the arbitrary structure of Julie Hesmondhalgh’s A-Z book — it didn’t matter if the content wasn’t in an arc, as long as the material was in there somewhere concisely and impactfully. While reading her book, I was often struck by Hesmondhalgh’s warmth and humour, and how these aspects created momentum by welcoming, engaging, and holding a reader. I tried to do something similar with Fair: no matter how disorienting the ‘fair’ might get, the reader can always rely on their affable and self-deprecating tour guide of an author.

The critic shouldn’t ever forget that they were once a child

The title and the modus operandi of Jefferson’s memoir certainly influenced my choice to make my ‘fair’ appear in a permanent state of construction. This unfinished state signals the ‘madeness’ of all life writing, as well as how a memoir is always incomplete. In the same Granta interview, Jefferson shared of Constructing, ‘Even now I think of it, formally as a work in progress. Not unfinished. Happy to unsettle and be unsettling.’ This took away my fear of not having ‘perfected’ the memoir; I was satisfied with having attempted it at all.

Whatever you’re trying to do with your work of life writing, someone will have most likely done it before. That shouldn’t put you off. Though we all experience ‘the anxiety of influence’, or wonder about the point of doing or making something that already exists, I’ve found it reassuring, energising, and inspiring to discover writers doing the kinds of things I’d like to do in my own work, before making my own attempt. It’s not working to a template, but getting a gentle push in a direction you might not have risked otherwise. 

Sometimes the books I read in my preparatory research reading give me an idea for one tiny aspect of my book or a possibility for its whole structure. The pieces we write are made from a unique constellation of possibly hundreds of books — that’s what makes them original and wholly our own.

What kind of life writing are you trying to create? You might discover the answer through your own unique research journey. 

Cover image: Frank Samet on Pexels