When we write about our lives, invariably our stories will touch on experiences that involve close family members and important others. Sometimes our version of the story may differ from their memory of the same event. Our portraits may even be unflattering. How then do we represent the people who matter to us without offending and causing harm? Is this possible? Can we adopt an ethical practice and be sensitive in our treatment of the subject matter without compromising our story? These are complex and pertinent issues for life writers. They are also unavoidable so it is worth spending time thinking through the right approach.
When Blake Morrison wrote his memoir of his father, And When did you last see your father?, he wanted to commemorate and pay tribute to his father’s life but bubbling below the surface was a family secret that had weighed on him as he was growing up. Some of the memoir was an attempt to disentangle his father’s possible long-term affair with a married friend of the family. Although the exact nature of this relationship was never explicitly defined, leaving the reader to read between the lines, nevertheless it raised an ethical dilemma for the author because his mother and the ‘other’ woman were still alive at the time of publication. When the author showed the draft to his mother she thought the portrait of her husband was accurate but ‘couldn’t see the point’ of including the other woman. She didn’t however stop the book going to press. It was only later Blake Morrison discovered that in the weeks prior to publication she had ‘felt depressed enough to talk (not to me but to my sister) of ‘topping herself.’[i] This is a salutary illustration of the power of words and the possible pain our writing may cause.
Here are some suggestions that might help you resolve your specific writing dilemmas:
If the reader however is deeply dismayed, threatening to abandon you, and cut you off from the family, or threatening libel then you might need to reconsider the choice of words and negotiate a solution. I can hear some writers and journalists spluttering at this idea. It is after all your carefully crafted creation, your ‘truth,’ and you have a right to freedom of speech and to write and publish what you want, don’t you. Do we?
In my work as a biographer recording the stories and achievements, the high points and sometimes the dark hours of living artists, writers and film makers I have found it is possible to reach a solution that satisfies both parties. The answer lies in adopting a participatory and transparent mode of work. This means working collaboratively and yes negotiating the words sometimes and rewriting to ensure the participant is comfortable with the end result. I have never felt constrained by this rather it pushes me to work harder to produce a more lucid, precise and faithful rendering of the person, their arguments and beliefs. It also exacts a certain intellectual rigour pushing me to be scrupulous and thorough in my research and claims. Under the scrutiny of an interested and involved reader the work really can evolve and deepen. Are you convinced?
When Blake Morrison wrote his memoir of his father, And When did you last see your father?, he wanted to commemorate and pay tribute to his father’s life but bubbling below the surface was a family secret that had weighed on him as he was growing up. Some of the memoir was an attempt to disentangle his father’s possible long-term affair with a married friend of the family. Although the exact nature of this relationship was never explicitly defined, leaving the reader to read between the lines, nevertheless it raised an ethical dilemma for the author because his mother and the ‘other’ woman were still alive at the time of publication. When the author showed the draft to his mother she thought the portrait of her husband was accurate but ‘couldn’t see the point’ of including the other woman. She didn’t however stop the book going to press. It was only later Blake Morrison discovered that in the weeks prior to publication she had ‘felt depressed enough to talk (not to me but to my sister) of ‘topping herself.’[i] This is a salutary illustration of the power of words and the possible pain our writing may cause.
Here are some suggestions that might help you resolve your specific writing dilemmas:
- First, write what you need to write. Write your heart out. Write fast and furiously, write down your truth. And do enjoy this experience. Really let yourself revel in the pleasure of releasing the story onto the page or the computer screen. This technique, known as free-writing can be extremely liberating. The trick however is to separate the free-writing from the edit that follows. Because it is in the edit that you can pause and consider any ethical dilemmas.
- Take time with the edit. Don’t rush towards publication until you are satisfied with your interpretation of the people and events that comprise your memoir.
- Experiment with different ways of telling the story. Try choosing the person featured in the story and write the story from their perspective. You might be surprised by the sudden insights that emerge.
- Test the material with a neutral reader.
- Embrace the participatory model. Put simply show the relevant family member what you have written before it goes to print and await their response. This is the bravest way to manage your material and the most effective.
- As you present the story attend to your instincts. If you feel guilty, or sick in the stomach then chances are the writing might need revision. But wait first to hear their thoughts. Often people’s reactions can surprise us. In the same memoir Blake Morrison encountered an unexpected reaction from the woman who had been a live-in helper in his family home. He had written about the sexual experimentation they had engaged in when he was fourteen and she ‘no less of an innocent, four years older.’[ii] Blake’s mother worried that the woman, who was her long-time housekeeper, would be upset by the revelations and hand in her notice. On the contrary she wished the author had used her real name and not a pseudonym.
If the reader however is deeply dismayed, threatening to abandon you, and cut you off from the family, or threatening libel then you might need to reconsider the choice of words and negotiate a solution. I can hear some writers and journalists spluttering at this idea. It is after all your carefully crafted creation, your ‘truth,’ and you have a right to freedom of speech and to write and publish what you want, don’t you. Do we?
In my work as a biographer recording the stories and achievements, the high points and sometimes the dark hours of living artists, writers and film makers I have found it is possible to reach a solution that satisfies both parties. The answer lies in adopting a participatory and transparent mode of work. This means working collaboratively and yes negotiating the words sometimes and rewriting to ensure the participant is comfortable with the end result. I have never felt constrained by this rather it pushes me to work harder to produce a more lucid, precise and faithful rendering of the person, their arguments and beliefs. It also exacts a certain intellectual rigour pushing me to be scrupulous and thorough in my research and claims. Under the scrutiny of an interested and involved reader the work really can evolve and deepen. Are you convinced?
At least I have indicated the choices. You can rewrite taking the responses into account. You can stay with your analysis of what happened and explain; ‘This is my version of the story. You may see the same events differently but this is my perspective.’ In the end the way you choose to manage any ethical dilemma is your decision. You must reflect on what you can live with and what is most important.
When I wrote the essay “Recollecting Childhood Memories” for Translucence: Life Writing from Manukau and Papakura I followed my own advice. I wrote my version and loved every moment of the writing. It was freeing and exciting. I got to experience the pleasure of arranging scattered memories of childhood into a satisfying whole. But then I had to consider the consequences of my storytelling and its impact on my family. Previously I had written an unpublished and longer story of my childhood and tested it with my mother. At that time the story wasn’t ready, there were unresolved issues and she was unsettled by it. I chose to put the work away into the deepest recess of my filing cabinet and wait. Two years later my mother sent me a quotation from Fiona Kidman’s memoir Beside the Dark Pool where she discusses the response of a childhood friend to Kidman’s story of her own childhood:
"I was beginning to make my way as a writer. Later I would talk about my life in public, and the next time we talked she challenged accounts of my childhood in which she is missing. You and I shared a life, she has said, and we were happy.
Maybe, I said on that occasion, but I think now that I had two or three lives operating at that time; she was in one of them. She is not missing, she had just got into a different narrative. This is one of the writer’s dilemmas, of course, to tease out strands of truth and make them whole. In fiction, it is not so difficult because truth is what the writer decides it will be. Real life is not like that – exact truth is an individual’s personal nightmare and fantasy, which nobody else, however close, can really share."[iii]
When I received this quotation from my mother I sensed she was giving me permission to write my version of our story. And this time round when I showed it to her she was more comfortable with the material. She corrected some mistakes; your father was twenty-eight when he died, not twenty-nine. Your grandmother was half Danish, she said. But she allowed me poetic license when I said, ‘It is in the interests of the narrative flow for her to be my Danish grandmother and she identified strongly with that aspect of her heritage.’ My mother then elaborated on the story about my father and brother’s ‘afterlife.’ She said, “We were living in Diamond Harbour after your father’s death and when you asked where he had gone I said, ‘he is beyond the high hills. You have to remember that at that time I was a member of the Anglican Church and I believed in eternal life. From then on you referred to your father and brother being ‘over the high hills.’”
Following our discussion I tried adding this extra layer to the story but it seemed clunky and I decided to retain the mountains because when we moved to the farm on the Canterbury Plains, with its uninterrupted view of the Southern Alps, my imagination made a leap and positioned my dead father and brother in those mountains. At the end of our discussion my mother said she remembered everything in the story and that the writing was evocative and true to the time and the events. “That is how it was,” she reflected in a steady tone. And then the words I was hoping for, “I like it.”
So you see how your writing can evolve through discussion with the key figures in your life and how it can offer an opportunity for deeper reflection on the events that affected you.
[i] Blake Morrison, “When I last saw him,” Granta, Jubilee issue, 87, 2004: 285.
[ii] ibid: 286.
[iii] Fiona Kidman, at the end of Darwin Road: a memoir, Auckland: Vintage, Random, 2008: 70.
When I wrote the essay “Recollecting Childhood Memories” for Translucence: Life Writing from Manukau and Papakura I followed my own advice. I wrote my version and loved every moment of the writing. It was freeing and exciting. I got to experience the pleasure of arranging scattered memories of childhood into a satisfying whole. But then I had to consider the consequences of my storytelling and its impact on my family. Previously I had written an unpublished and longer story of my childhood and tested it with my mother. At that time the story wasn’t ready, there were unresolved issues and she was unsettled by it. I chose to put the work away into the deepest recess of my filing cabinet and wait. Two years later my mother sent me a quotation from Fiona Kidman’s memoir Beside the Dark Pool where she discusses the response of a childhood friend to Kidman’s story of her own childhood:
"I was beginning to make my way as a writer. Later I would talk about my life in public, and the next time we talked she challenged accounts of my childhood in which she is missing. You and I shared a life, she has said, and we were happy.
Maybe, I said on that occasion, but I think now that I had two or three lives operating at that time; she was in one of them. She is not missing, she had just got into a different narrative. This is one of the writer’s dilemmas, of course, to tease out strands of truth and make them whole. In fiction, it is not so difficult because truth is what the writer decides it will be. Real life is not like that – exact truth is an individual’s personal nightmare and fantasy, which nobody else, however close, can really share."[iii]
When I received this quotation from my mother I sensed she was giving me permission to write my version of our story. And this time round when I showed it to her she was more comfortable with the material. She corrected some mistakes; your father was twenty-eight when he died, not twenty-nine. Your grandmother was half Danish, she said. But she allowed me poetic license when I said, ‘It is in the interests of the narrative flow for her to be my Danish grandmother and she identified strongly with that aspect of her heritage.’ My mother then elaborated on the story about my father and brother’s ‘afterlife.’ She said, “We were living in Diamond Harbour after your father’s death and when you asked where he had gone I said, ‘he is beyond the high hills. You have to remember that at that time I was a member of the Anglican Church and I believed in eternal life. From then on you referred to your father and brother being ‘over the high hills.’”
Following our discussion I tried adding this extra layer to the story but it seemed clunky and I decided to retain the mountains because when we moved to the farm on the Canterbury Plains, with its uninterrupted view of the Southern Alps, my imagination made a leap and positioned my dead father and brother in those mountains. At the end of our discussion my mother said she remembered everything in the story and that the writing was evocative and true to the time and the events. “That is how it was,” she reflected in a steady tone. And then the words I was hoping for, “I like it.”
So you see how your writing can evolve through discussion with the key figures in your life and how it can offer an opportunity for deeper reflection on the events that affected you.
[i] Blake Morrison, “When I last saw him,” Granta, Jubilee issue, 87, 2004: 285.
[ii] ibid: 286.
[iii] Fiona Kidman, at the end of Darwin Road: a memoir, Auckland: Vintage, Random, 2008: 70.