What tense shall we use? That’s the first question autobiographers must settle. The historic present might convey a sense of immediacy. ‘I’m just one race away from becoming an Olympic champion,’ Victoria Pendleton writes, describing events four years ago in Beijing. ‘My legs have been unbelievably quiet. They lead down to my feet, and I pump them effortlessly, hard and fast, up and down, round and round.’ It proved a winning formula.
Things hadn’t always been so easy. ‘I am not the same girl who took a Swiss Army knife and used it on herself because the cutting was less hurtful than the darker pain inside,’ we discover on page six of Between the Lines. No indeed, for the ‘opening words to “Today” by The Smashing Pumpkins, ring through me’. And if she needs to check them now, there they are, tattooed on her arm: ‘Today is the greatest day I’ve ever known.’
The Christmas bestseller lists are full of sports autobiographies, which I would not ordinarily read. Bradley Wiggins, too, we are told in My Time, had his usual playlist on the headphones as he got ‘in the zone’ before clinching the 2012 Tour de France. (Being ‘in the zone’, a state of perfect concentration leading to optimal performance, is a phrase first noted among tennis players in California in the mid-1970s.) ‘Ten minutes to start: off the turbo, into the bus; have a piss; overshoes on, gloves on, wipe down, sit down for a couple of minutes. Calm down.’ This telegraphic style does not, fortunately, persist, and the cyclist reverts to the simple past tense for past travails.
Jessica Ennis, though, does choose the historic present in Unbelievable, to set the scene at her Olympic performance.
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