With the Edinburgh Fringe well and truly over, countless performers will be counting up how many coveted four- or five-star reviews they garnered. Most, though, won’t have even landed one. I’ve been there and let me tell you, it’s hard not to take the rejection personally — especially if your show is all about you.
From cancer to coming-out, poverty to prison, and addiction to ADHD, this year’s Fringe had something to offer anyone of a voyeuristic bent. This massive rise in comedy, music and drama exploring personal adversities peaked this year with the wildly successful TV show Baby Reindeer — which was itself born in Edinburgh. Today, it seems, we can’t get enough of that “lived-experience” pie.
But many years before this particular pie became a mainstay of the arts, I was one of several unwitting pioneers who road-tested this highly personal brand of storytelling in the most glamorous and prestigious domain of all: Scotland’s third sector.
In 2001, grieving the sudden death of my alcoholic, drug-addicted mother and reeling from a family breakdown which had left me homeless and also on the path of alcoholism, I carried a lot of sorrow and anger which required an outlet. I hastily began up-cycling my trauma into my best attempt at art. A growing interest in hip-hop and rap quickly became an obsession; notepads scrawled with lyrics and ideas, baggy trousers, hoodies and headphones, and the obligatory confrontational attitude.
Performing locally, under the name Loki, at open-mic nights and rap battles, I discharged my adolescent fury as autobiographical stories set to dusty boom-bap drumbeats. My reputation grew in the Glasgow music scene, and I eventually established myself as a community artist. Then when the third sector got a hold of me (and my “story”), I would take to the stage at conferences where professionals sat slack jawed and misty-eyed at my ability to not only tell my story, but to see it in a wider social and economic context: poverty.
Back then there seemed an endless thirst for my accounts of adversity. Whether campaigning for Scottish Independence, calling out decision-makers for letting down the most vulnerable or, indeed, my musical output, everything seemed to land a little better if my opinions or observations were nested within my own “experience”. This eventually culminated in the publication of my 2017 debut book Poverty Safari — part memoir, part social commentary — in which I revealed, among other things, the traumatic experiences of my childhood.
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SubscribeYou know what – I just don’t care.
Your comment is the best!
Then why comment?
It’s simple. To express my contempt.
Does that make you feel superior?
Exactly.
This is better from Darren but wtf is the Third Sector?
Anyway turning your trauma into performance might be therapeutic for some but others will feel that their grief is not a public property.
UK term for not state, not private. NGOs, charities, etc. http://toolkit.northernbridge.ac.uk/engagingwithpolicymakers/engagingwiththethirdsector/whatisthethirdsectorandwhatdoesitdo/
They’re state as far as I’m concerned. They all get their money from somewhere and I’m not aware of any that are wholly privately funded.
You’re right, about the funding at any rate. The risk that I’ve always perceived with NGOs is that they receive public money without public accountability.
Top marks to him for getting it right in the end, and top marks to Unherd for giving him the outlet for this change of tack. (And yes, i do regard the outpouring of victimhood as tacky.)
This needs to be more widely publicised, but then i suppose the trolls will get hold of it. That’s the world that his initial outpourings have created.
Not just tacky, unhealthy.
Self pity, conceit and attention seeking take many forms.
Is what is needed more therapists? Or is it a culture that focuses less on the self and more on getting heads out of b*m holes and getting on with lives!
I believe half our problems stem from therapists not actually wanting to work with truly traumatised people and wanting easier subjects like the mildly anxious or depressed. Unfortunately truly traumatised people tend to have such defences in place that they are very dislikable and difficult to help if they can be helped at all! Sadly being mildly anxious or depressed is so normal, we are all potential therapy patients!
Interestingly, if your lived experiences contradicts the equality and diversity message, then your lived experience is wrong!
It reminds me of this:
In a perfect world, there wouldn’t be any hospital waiting lists.
No, in perfect world, we wouldn’t need any hospitals.
Interesting but I am having some difficulty squaring the title with this line: “Those of us who trade in the currency of lived experiences are, like everyone else, unreliable narrators.”
Flaunting looks very much like trading in the currency of.
The only performance I managed to attend at the Edinburgh Fringe this year fitted your description. A humourless, self-indulgent monologue which the performer clearly thought insightful and witty – and which had, incidentally, won prizes in the United States. It quite put me off going to see anything that threatened to be remotely similar. However that weekend we did manage to find a great value Italian restaurant called Mamma Roma and enjoyed a delicious exhibition of paintings by John Lavery at the Royal Scottish Academy (which runs till October).
Edinburgh is a lovely city; it’s just a pity they don’t bother to scrub the soot off all that elegant stonework.
The soot is part of the heritage. Edinburgh wasn’t called ‘auld reeky’ for nothing.
Whenever I hear phrases such as “my truth” or “my lived experience” I generally tune out to everything that comes after. Everyone has a story and just because someone has a “stage” to tell theirs doesn’t mean it has any relevance beyond them.
I read Mr Garveys book recently and was appalled at a lot of it. That real people really do those things that I thought were just in TV dramas I choose not to watch. Then I thought it was intelligent that he did something with it,but what I think is astonishing is that he didn’t stop there. A professional victim making money from his trauma. He went beyond that,he saw how in a.subtle.way HE was being used. Nowadays unless you have a trauma you’re not a validated person. The problem is,if you cure your problem and you’re “normal” youre not interesting any more. A further thought occurs to me. Pre 1979 when it was harder to be unemployed than employed being normal and dull was OK,it didnt stop you having an income of sorts. But since then and with rising unemployment and a regular income more precarious having a trauma or.condition may be the gate to an income,meagre but available. It’s just a thought
“The greatest irony of the lived experience movement is that most people living with active trauma wouldn’t be caught dead in the media.” is well said…and is the real story here.
Willful victimhood, victimhood-by-proxy and performative victimhood are collectively the great curse of our Woke era. Virtue-signalling victimhood-by-proxy is the worst of the lot and toxically seductive because many decent people just don’t pick up on its essentially bogus nature…. pick up on the champagne in the socialist, the thought-policeman in the Gay Pride marcher, the racist in the anti-Racist, the have-your-cake-and-eat-it coquetry in the Cosmopolitan feminist. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/are-we-making-progress
Well-expressed and worthwhile thoughts at your linked Substack. Cheers.
Very good personal essay. Self-searching but not self-fixated. I’ve seen McGarvey’s voice and depth develop since his first byline here, still bearing the “Loki” moniker. I expect increasingly good things from this youngish author. And I’m glad I haven’t read his earlier Trauma Chronicles.
Since the mid-Nineties success of memoirs like Angela’s Ashes (McCourt) and Liar’s Club (Karr)—both worthwhile in my view, both part poverty-misery porn—a steaming heap of exercises in public catharsis/sordid exhibition have been under the literary spotlight.
“What if our trauma primes us for a subtle form of self-exploitation, where in pursuit of safety, security and validation, we tell our stories in ways that actually make us more vulnerable?”
Aye, and how about the fact that the modish quality of vulnerability is not an intrinsic virtue? Do we need to reveal any vulnerability to predators and cheats, let alone share every element of weakness we can think of?
As a very moody person with competing strains of toughness and hypersensitivity—what a brave confession!—I think more of us need to lean into a kind of humane stoicism. With much less self-pity and more generosity: something between ‘shut up I can’t be bothered about your suffering’ and ‘make me your next victim’.
What is “lived experience” beyond merely experience?
The trauma of my lived experience of experiencing this pleonasm is endless.
If there’s an expression whose eyes I could happily pull out with my thumbs, it’s the tautological shitter that is ‘lived experience’ – ‘experience’, but with a line of heart emojis after it.
Excellent comment – I just about sprayed my breakfast across the table laughing. Thanks for that!
“Lived experience…”
Is there any other kind?
There’s the vicarious kind. Just a bit of imagination needed with a sufficiently vivid account of an event – could be written, recounted, or watched. Like I’ve seen all sorts of places close up – Lagos, Tomsk, Bella Horizonte – but only on a Google StreetView trudge! Seen not smelled or heard I’ll grant but it’s still experience, just not “lived”. I guess the writer was referring fairly specifically to the more dramatic end of the spectrum with consequences that outlasted the event.
We wouldn’t be so susceptible to the “lived experience” manipulation if we had more exposure to literature and history. There is no aspect of this trend that has not been lived before.
I suggest one listens to those who survived the death camps of the Nazis. the Gulags of the Communists and killing fields of Cambodia.
A Lithuanian friend who survived the USSR invasion of his country in 1939; growing up in Eastern Europe in WW2 and the refugee camps of Germany post WW2 said in order to survive one has to place ones memories in abox and bury it. Once he talked about the mass executions he had witnessed; the hunger and seeing refugee colums blown to pieces with scraps of human and horse flesh hanging from shattered trees. Perhaps one of the most chilling comments he made ” It is difficult to kill someone when one looks into their eyes, that is why the executioners shot people in the back of the head “.
Those who have lived through horrors do not pay to be entertained by people talking about their problems.
This is the most humble, most honest, most authentic first-person article I’ve read in a long time
I agree. I really enjoyed it. And I certainly don’t believe the author was looking for pity or anything like that.
So true.
A fine piece, thank you.
Excellent.
An interesting article but there are good examples of real life trauma being parlayed into great art. Edward St Aubyn’s Melrose novels and Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain spring to mind.
Excellent, very self-aware analysis. I don’t agree with everything Darren McGarvey says, but he certainly can write.