Secret history: 'Researching my idol Judy Garland gave me biographer's blues'

Private by nature, despite a tendency to burst into song, I'm amazed to find I have a memoir coming out this week. How did that happen? When did I decide I felt comfortable writing about myself, beyond the confines of a rather arch newspaper column? I didn't decide. I'm not comfortable. Like the chubby teenager with a tummy ache who gives birth quite unexpectedly in the supermarket car park one day, it just happened.

Or rather, what happened is this: I had been longing for two decades to write a book about my hero Judy Garland, whose presence has inspired and enriched my inner world for most of my life. As a hyper-sensitive child with strong emotions, I had watched The Wizard of Oz with my mother in a state of amazement. In Judy Garland, I saw a person whose feelings seemed to run as high as my own, only she wasn't hiding it or ashamed or even embarrassed; she was leading with her strong feelings as though they were the best things a person could have.

It was an instant smash of fellow-feeling, recognition, permission, validation, as though the side of myself I'd learned to view as an affliction Judy thought could be the making of me. Almost as soon as I could write, I thought of writing about her. Yet as there are more than 30 books on this subject and no new discoveries, I couldn't see a way of doing it afresh.

Then, two years ago, I pictured a book about Judy Garland I could write, a book about me and her. I'd take events from her life, a few from mine, put hero-worship itself on the couch, and through a prism of Judy examine matters relating to rescue, consolation, love, grief and fame: subjects I have been mulling over since childhood. Bingo! Make your hobby your job, career sages say, and this is what I resolved to do.

From the start it was clear to me that the memoir part of the book would not dominate; indeed, that a little of me would go a long way. Yet I knew that all my meditations on Judy's extraordinary powers of communication, on life, and on how we negotiate our losses, would need the central thread of me to give them pace and shape. I wanted it to be the sort of book where you have no idea what's coming next, but in a way that feels exhilarating, not random or confusing or daft.

I put a little more of myself in, then a little more, then I took a great deal out, and then put in a little more. I wanted the transitions between Judy's life and my own to be at once startling, subtle and apt. As one of the things I so admire about Garland is her ability to convey absolutely neat human emotion, I also knew the book would need to be very sincere. And I wanted the prose to have the tremulous quality that Garland had. It was quite a tall order.

My editor enjoyed my crumpled manuscript, complete with 80 glued-in photographs, but she had one caveat. "You do not say where you were born, or anything about your home, or if you have brothers or sisters, or anything really about your parents." "I know, rather stylish for a memoir, don't you think?"

She did not. We had a difficult conversation during which, for a moment, I lost my nerve, but I found it again and together we decided to view the need to put more of my life in the book as a technical problem rather than an emotional one. This shift in perspective made my dilemma seem more familiar - a bit like the crossroads I've sometimes reached halfway through writing a novel, when I long to get to the ending but there isn't quite enough book there to justify my downward descent. Solving the problem of myself was helped in part by reading U and I, Nicholson Baker's wonderful book about his obsession with John Updike, and In My Father's House by Miranda Seymour. Both works allow some of the dilemmas of this sort of writing to pierce the narrative.

I pondered all the ethical concerns. If you write about your family, you are claiming to a certain extent that yours is the official version or even the truth: isn't that bound to drive everyone mad? Should one be reasonably sensitive to others' feelings or absolutely immaculate in that regard? Is there something not quite nice about writing a memoir?

Then began the anxiety. The mild sense of unease can be stimulating at times, almost a heroic spur, and it keeps life vivid, even visceral, which is how I like it. But this anxiety was of a wholly different order. I couldn't sleep or eat and there were still nine months before publication. I gave up caffeine and alcohol and avoided taxing situations, but it made little difference. I didn't understand why I felt as strongly as I did: the constant violent reprimand coming from an anonymous figure who told me I'd done something very wrong. On good days I felt like Marianne in Sense and Sensibility, who believes that the fact she has done something means it cannot be incorrect, as she knows her instincts are good and true. Look what happened to her!

Q. How ludicrous do you feel when you write a book whose publication you dread more than illness or death? A. Very. To ease the stress, I decided we should move house. One day I felt so consumed with worry that I telephoned a psychoanalyst friend and asked him what to do. "Ah, you mustn't just treat your anxiety, you must listen to it, it's trying to tell you something important." "What, exactly?" I asked. Like Glinda the Good Witch in Munchkinland, he made it clear I'd have to find out for myself.

I gave the book to both my parents and said I would take out anything they did not like. Happily, neither asked me to remove a thing, although my mother said she thought it was a bit rough to describe Liza Minnelli's ex-husband as half-walrus, half-fishhook. "It's a daring book," she said, "but in no way shocking. And you've been so careful of everyone your whole life..."

Perhaps my experiences were especially acute because there were so many people to please, or at least not offend There's the majestic figure of Judy herself, whose soaring high spirits and irrepressible wit and charm I have tried to capture.

Her response to the book, I hope, would be delicious cackling accompanied by a chain of delighted expletives. Then there are the legions of fans, notoriously protective of their Legend. Then there's my family and friends, then Judy's family. That's before you even think of readers or critics.

Such is the fashion for memoir that it is not unusual for novelists who submit manuscripts with a strong autobiographical flavour to be asked by publishers to reframe them as memoir. I hope that these writers are not suffering. I hope their editors and agents are looking after them, and out for them, as mine have done.

Susie Boyt's 'My Judy Garland Life' is published by Virago

Cures for memoir anxiety

Miranda Seymour

'In My Father's House'

The best advice I received when writing about my family was from my brother. There are, he pointed out, many versions of the truth; the version that is printed will be perceived, troublingly, as the sole truth. It isn't; it never can be. My solution was to use a counter-voice, my mother's, to dispute mine. It eased my guilt; it gave my book a heroine; it didn't lessen the anxiety. Telling the truth, the first commandment for memoir writing, seemed the hardest to obey. Following your conscience is the second... trying not to cause unnecessary hurt. The third is to give yourself, the presenter of the facts, no quarter. It's a painful process.

Antonia Quirke

'Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers'

Nobody actually complained. Some of them were shocked. But my principle, not to hang anyone out to dry apart from myself (and Sean Penn and Brad Pitt), pretty much won out. The one guy I do slightly slap on the wrist... actually sent the extract to all the people he knew saying. "That's me!". I never felt bad about writing the stories down – they belong to me too. But my parents were very upset at first... Then they just gathered themselves... and were lovely.

Simon Doonan

'Beautiful People'

I was determined to write an un-misery memoir, something which would make people chuckle rather than depress or offend them. I am more than happy to make embarrassing disclosures about myself, but strenuously avoided airing other people's old knickers. I used my sister, Shelagh, as a sounding-board... She helped me sweeten up some of my memories. 'Beautiful People' gave us a closer connection... I was more affected by our childhood adjacency to our schizophrenic relatives than she was. I grew up thinking madness was inevitable. It seemed almost like a rite of passage.

Janice Galloway

'This is not about me'

I didn't start off writing a memoir, but the people in the book seemed awfully like my family... I tripped myself up hearing my mother's voice describing her last pregnancy... Offending people? They're all dead. Had my mother been alive I might have felt inhibited, but this is my stock-in-trade. As writers we allow others to pass judgements about our view of experience. It's a way of not growing up... A friend of mine said his father would die when he read his book. Well, I've never ever heard: "Cause of Death - Reading a Book".

Alex James

'A Bit of a Blur'

I found it hugely uplifting: wonderful. Like doing a fit of accounts, a good spring cleaning, putting everything in order. It was hugely cathartic; more than that, it resets all your gyroscopes. All these albatrosses I'd been carrying around, the weight of them. I realised they just weren't that important... And it's a good chance to play God. "Aha, let's write this the way I remember it." That's what I like about writing, unlike songs or films or broadcasting: it's one person speaking. That's the power – just you.