Richard Beard says he’s got ‘better at telling the truth’ by arranging his life story on a grid – and invites others to do the same
R
ichard Beard, award-winning author of The Day That Went Missing and Sad Little Men, thought he was writing his next book, a whole life memoir. In the event, he has written his way off the page and into an entirely new publishing model. The Universal Turing Machine is the title both of Beard’s memoir and the mass memoir project he hopes others will help him to build.
Organised as a chessboard, each of the 64 squares narrates one year of Beard’s life, in 1,000 words per year. (He’s 58, so the last five years are fictionalised.) The reader moves around the “board” as if they were a knight, picking the next year to read from options limited by the knight’s L-shaped ambulation.
“The way you go round it, what you want to know, will tell you something about yourself,” he says. Each entry or square contains signposts to future and past entries; you can pick your subplot or skip to the juiciest bits, read faithfully or game the machine. The public are free to respond to the constraints of the board however they choose, merging or repeating years, provided they submit 64 years to fit the shape of the board, each of no more than 1,000 words. The memoirs will be displayed in a grid with each square a clickable whole-life memoir. As more are published, the overall grid of the “machine” will grow.
