Sakshi Malik’s memoir ‘Witness’: The wrestler sees an unsparing image of herself in her own mirror
Her parents, siblings, former opponents, and present comrades will also find reflections of themselves that they would far rather have hidden from the world.
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“It is indisputable,” reads a line in the autobiography of an Indian cricket icon co-written by a journalist, “that my parents were very supportive.”
Indeed?
There is a reason (auto)biographies of Indian sportspersons are almost uniformly inane – a reason explained by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and memoirist JR Moehringer in a May 2023 piece in The New Yorker.
Moehringer, whose own coming-of-age story The Tender Bar ranks as a classic of the memoirist’s art, and who has co-written the bestselling autobiographies of tennis legend Andre Agassi, Nike founder Phil Knight, and England’s estranged Prince Harry, recounts a conversation he had with the latter during a pre-writing session that did not end well.
A story, carved from a life
After a long discussion with Harry, Moehringer refused the offer to co-write the book. Why? “Because, I told him, everything you just said is about you. You want the world to know that you did a good job, that you were smart. But, strange as it may seem, a memoir isn’t about you. It’s not even the story of your life. It’s a story carved from your life, a particular series of events chosen because they have the greatest resonance for the widest range of people…”
The art of memoir, encapsulated in six words: A story, carved from a life.
That is the...
