Hurry Up and Die So I Can Write About You
... is not the only approach to avoiding lawsuits
When you’re a writer, you’re basically a bastard.1
Everyone who knows you, knows it: you’re going to magpie the shit out of stuff they tell you. You’ll turn their fuck-ups into entertainment. You’ll steal strips of their personality and cobble them together with bits from other people to create a horrific Wickerman labelled a “fictional character” in which they are going to get roasted.
Well, not everyone you know, because some people aren’t interesting enough; them you’ll just drop from your life because you are, as noted above, a bastard. But the rest of humanity? Fodder.
Someone comes into your life? They’re asking for it. Any time spent in your company is risky. The longer they know you, the more likely they’ll end up in your words. Which wouldn’t matter, except the one thing writers really, really like to do, is shove their words out into the public arena like poorly-armed Christians, where beasts with teeth will rip into them. Imagine seeing on Goodreads, “I hate the Tony character,” when you believe you are the Tony character. Well, you’re not, but he does share your physical attributes, your taste in whisky, and your last three girlfriends.
You have to feel for them, your friends. The poor buggers are apt to turn into “material” at a moment’s notice, and they’ve no control over what you’re going to say about them. It’s frankly amazing that writers have any friends at all. But if they know you’re a writer, people who have willingly chosen to be in your life knew what they were getting, and that’s on them.
Family, though, that’s different. You weren’t exactly born with a warning label. Whether you hold them culpable for their unfortunate fate depends on whether you believe writers are born or made. For me, both: at four years old, I taught myself to write by tracing the words of The Emperor’s Nightingale when I was supposed to be napping, and believed I was destined to be as big a deal as that Shakespeare fella my Mum kept banging on about (didn’t quite pan out, I’ll be honest). There was definitely a strong strand of “born”. But the fascinating family mess I was NOT ALLOWED TO TALK ABOUT added gallons of motivational fuel, acres of material, and that magical 10,000 hours of practice to master the skills.
It’s not that I’ve ever wanted to hurt any of them. In fact, what I really wanted to do was understand them, myself, and the whole of the rest of humanity. I mean, what was going on? But in my quest to understand, I sometimes forgot — indeed, forget — to consider how a particular sentence will land in the mind of someone who feels bad about the stuff they did, or can’t remember doing it in the first place. In my passionate desire to document, explore, examine, and gain insights into the human condition, I have sometimes hurt people I love.
Julian Barnes wrote about this conundrum in The New Statesman, saying: “the family is where you are first misjudged, maltreated, belittled, lied to and beaten – or not.” He describes Czeslaw Milosz’s well-known statement, “when a writer is born into a family, the family is finished”, as “absurdly overstated and self-aggrandising” while acknowledging its truth in the following form:
In my own case, when writing my first novel, and trying to find the necessary mental space and freedom to do so, I told myself, “Write it as if all your family were dead.” I didn’t, of course, want my family to be dead; it was just a necessary literary tactic.
The literary tactic of imagining your family dead is something I can get behind. The issue is, then you publish, and they are very much alive.
Novels you can at least defend as fictive, but what of poetry, which the Dewey Decimal system files as “non-fiction”.2 After my first collection was published, my brother-out-law3 sent me a Posy Simmonds cartoon of family members sobbing in the kitchen over a book as the writer stood looking pleased with himself, one of his relatives protesting, “But we’re family, Roger, not just your material!” In homage to that cartoon, I called my second collection, Material.4 That collection got me shouted at down the phone, and after that, I confined my poetic subject matter to the 16th century.
I managed to upset another loved one much more recently with a single line of dialogue thrown into an essay on this platform intended to illustrate the way abusive people can isolate you by charming your family. The fallout was pretty devastating.
And yet, I will continue to write about family, because they’re the people who make us who we are, at least until we take editorial revisions into our hands. They are our primary source material, the people we get to know deepest and dirtiest. Write what you know.
So that’s friends and family covered.
What about the people who fall into neither category? The ones who fucked with you, and not in the fun way? This looks easy as falling off a log — who cares what they think? — but in this age of increased rage, craziness and indeed litigation, even falling off a log could break your neck. Ex-husband aside I’ve tried to steer clear, adhere to the Golden Rule of Do As You Would Be Done By, but sometimes the temptation to entertain is intoxicating, the story too good … and this, my friend, is why I spent the second half of last year tied up with lawyers and praying that you loved me enough to top up my GoFundMe (you did, praise the god of seeded bagels).
But earlier this week, thinking about something light and yet juicy for this post, the title surfaced like a particularly mischievous hippo. I don’t actually want anyone to die so I can safely write about my experience with them without being sued. Yet as we all know, only the good die young and the complete shitheads carry on making life a misery for everyone around them into their nineties. I’m not sure where that leaves me. It’s probably not a hard and fast rule.
Anyway, you can’t bank all your best stories with the gamble that you’ll outlive the people concerned, so you have a couple of choices. You turn them into a fictional character or you disguise them as heavily as possible and sprinkle your writing with the phrase “in my honest opinion”5 which I gather from my £450-an-hour defamation lawyer is one way I might have avoided my previous trouble. That and a bit of fact-checking. Humour pieces are not exempt from the sensitive soul with deep pockets.
However, I’ve found so much fun in my preamble that it is now an amble of its own, a mini-essay on the perils of writing, so the person I was going to write about is safe for another week at least (or maybe it is me who is safe; thanks, subconscious!).
Writing is always dangerous on some level. Words are powerful. In authoritarian states, writers are among the first to be imprisoned and controlled. Novels, poetry and memoir are exposing for the writer and anyone they might have absorbed into their world. Comedy is always in danger of offending or being taken seriously. Satire, in the wrong political climate, can get you killed.
Yet writers must write. My need to tell these stories remains over-powering, whether in poems, novels, or personal essays. Waiting for people to snuff it isn’t an option. You never know how long you have yourself; if I die at the age my Mum did, I’ve got four years. So it’s time to stop doing other things (and this, my friend, is my theory as to why I got sacked).
Writing is a form of both thinking and connection. Right now, at this stage in our human evolution, as our technologies and the megalomaniacs in control of them isolate us and try to poison us with anxiety, we have never needed those two things more. Building communities of sensitive, deep-thinking people is the future. Sharing how to evolve ourselves out of dysfunctional or abusive relationships is vital.
Stick around. Humanity’s got a bit of growing up to do, and we’re entering the toddler tantrum phase. You and I, we can take a deep breath, step away, and have a soothing drink of choice. Keeping an eye on the star chart.
Postscript
It is not too late to offend your own friends and family by joining the How to Evolve “Writing Home” challenge and getting your memoir off to a flying start (though of course you have the option to save your relationships by not pressing ‘publish’). The cost after the first fortnight is a mere £6 a month for as long as you can stand it, and at least one intimate relationship. Kidding.
Do you like what you read? If you actually “like” it, all the lit-up hearts gather into little kisses for me, and then roll into a big iron ball and punch Elon Musk in the testicles. Try it!
P.S. After telling you all the times I was not a mindful writer, this is undoubtedly the perfect time to tell you that I am running an online workshop on Mindful Memoir in March for The Mindful Writer. Check it out! This is actually why I was thinking about all this stuff.
For satirical purposes only. For legal purposes, I deny this completely. I am a heart-centred person with a slightly rebellious sense of humour.
I object to this classification. What of persona poems etc? The perception that all poetry is autobiographical has brought me trouble more than once.
I use this title to denote closeness. Brother-in-law now, but they didn’t make it legal for a quarter century, and he’s very much “outlaw” in personality.
It was some other name than Roger but I can’t currently locate the cartoon.
This is terribly important. Please make a note. If I had known this factoid I could have saved myself six months of bad sleep and £14,000.
This is just terrific, Ros. I loved it! Both because I could relate to so many of your points, and because it is so engagingly, humorously, well written!
Hilarious! True even! Caused me to choke on my coffee & snuck nefarious thoughts into my general niceness.