Letting the blood in

Today this arrived in the post:

Carolyn Ellis, or 'the mother of auto-ethnography' as I recently heard her called, is the reason I ended up accepting that my thesis had changed and actually embraced the change. I read her book 'The Ethnographic I' cover to cover over a weekend. Here was a piece of academic writing that was accessible, engaging and educational. I loved it and selfishly devoured it. 

This book is the follow up book; an auto-ethnographic story of why Ellis uses the form. Some of her topics are heart wrenching including the death of her beloved brother and her choice to terminate a pregnancy. It is, as Jess Moriaty says, 'letting the blood in'. Ellis' use of herself as object of her own research goes deeply into every corner of her life. 

However not everything she writes happens in the way she describes; this is no factual recount or historical record. Instead auto-ethnography in the way Ellis uses it is about writing stories of what happened to try and capture the essence of the event; a version of the 'truth'. It is this single element that has meant the most to my research for it has enabled me to discuss challenging issues without compromising my ethical responsibility. I have tried to create a world in which my characters live that can be analysed and studied in depth whilst protecting them. This 'world' is full of truth, it is certainly real. Yet it is not the exact world that events happened in. 

A comparison could be the world of Thomas Cromwell in 'Wolf Hall' by Mantel as opposed to the historical account of the same events by Tracy Borman in 'Thomas Cromwell: the Untold Story'. I didn't come away from reading Mantel learning nothing about the events of Cromwell's life; it wasn't untrue but neither was it true. It was factual but it wasn't fact. 

This notion of story and truth will be at the heart of what I will have to defend in a viva. I had better get reading about it then....