Writing is about connection. It is about finding those commonalities through shared experience. So whenAnna Whartonand I discovered each other’s work we both thought: ‘now this is a woman I could sit down and chat with for hours over a bottle of wine’. Yet geography – the miles between us – made that impossible. So instead we committed to writing letters to one another, to discuss life, memoir, writing craft and more. And in this series, Memories of the Future: letters of an examined life, we have shared those unedited – and often very personal – letters with you, our readers.
For new subscribers, a catch-up, we started this letter-writing series in January and ran for four weeks, eight letters passing between us on a range of topics from motherhood to memoir and the ethics of writing about our personal lives, and how that is both felt by us and received by others. Here we return for another short series.
You can find Anna’s letter #15 here:
This is our last letter for a little while, but we would love to hear from you if you have anything to say about it or this latest series. Your comments inspire and further our conversations in letter, so please let us know if anything you have read resonates – or indeed you completely disagree. We would also really like to know if we should consider picking up this series of letters again.
And so, to letter #16
Dear Anna,
Firstly, I am sorry that our letter writing is coming to an end again – perhaps another pause? – because we are only just getting started on something interesting here. But maybe it is best to engage with this in bursts. We have done well having letters arrive so swiftly with the sometimes unreliable postal service.
Here I am, beating around the bush, and that is also the point. There is a key word in the previous paragraph which I want to spin from. I wonder if you can spot it?
It’s the word ‘sometimes’.
I wonder if it stood out to you as you read. Whether your internal editor screamed at you: delete; cut; draw a red line through its heart.
As I was writing, I was thinking to myself, Is the Royal Mail unreliable? Can I stand by the conviction that it is? Or is it mean to write that? What if someone from the Royal Mail was to read this and take offence?
It is not always unreliable, but it often is, but there are several small decisions we as writers make in the moment that we mark a piece of paper with words. Is this a truth? Can I stand by this claim if others contested it? Does the sentence look better, sound better, without the qualifier? My autocorrect seems to think so as there’s a blue line beneath the two words.
I am using this as an example because those decisions are about voice, story, debate, opinion, personality, they are aesthetic decisions, but they are also about our audience and how our words are going to be received. And in this case, including the word ‘sometimes’ also speaks of someone who sits on the fence, who struggles between making a point and people pleasing, who doesn’t want to offend.
My star sign is Libra, and so I like harmony; but this is something I also have to push against.
It’s interesting you bring up your career as a ghost writer, because ghost writing as I understand it is a collaboration, which enables you to inhabit another person’s experience and opinion and almost act as them, because you have their consent, and they are working alongside you to find the right voice for the story. This is very different from assuming an emotional state of a character with very different life experience from your own, and not doing your research.
I agree that as writers we have a duty to be truthful, but I do also believe we have a social responsibility. Everything we write exists within the social sphere. We as writers also have power.
Rather than shouting loudly from the top of a hill, writing is an interaction with other human beings. It is about communication, so how we are heard is important to how we speak. I believe we need to be aware of our audience and the effect our writing will have on them. But I also believe we should not be silenced by fear. If we are scared that our truth will upset people, we should write it anyway, because as the popular phrase goes: ‘the only thing necessary for evil to flourish is for the good men to do nothing’. But this is not a licence to say whatever we please, or to hurt the vulnerable.
I think responsibility comes down to sensitivity: our awareness of our potential audience and how it might upset people. But I still also think that writing should provoke and disrupt, and be allowed to offend.
Can you see that I am a Libra and so I am not very good at taking sides? It’s important for me to see both sides of the argument to keep the scales balanced.
But what this enables me to do is to write from multiple points of view. My father was a serial philanderer, a workaholic, a man, an alcoholic, all things I am not (thankfully). When I wrote about him in my memoir, Sins of My Father, I even imagined myself into scenarios that I had not personally witnessed, and an interviewer pulled me up on this, asking how I felt I could get away with it.
I thought long and hard about it, and answered that I had been his daughter, and had been victim to his selfishness, within a power dynamic that left me significantly weaker. I was gaslit by him on more than one occasion and my version of events was overwritten. Through the process of writing my version of my father’s story, I found my voice. It was important in my book that it was a voice that rose above his, as a process of finding my autonomy, which had previously been stifled. So I wonder whether it is a matter of power beyond anything else. Do we have more right over assuming the identity of someone if they are the perpetrator, not the target?
In my memoir I wrote about the sexual abuse I was victim to as a girl at the hands of one of my father’s friends, and how I was aware this wasn’t an isolated event – that I had always sensed it was common within the spiritual group/cult my dad was embroiled in. I wrote for every woman who had had the experience of being abused or raped by an older man, but I was very careful not to write specifically from any of these women’s perspectives, or to assume I knew what they had been through. This was because the very nature of this abuse silenced them, made worse because it happened within a cult and its own whitewashing and coercive control.
When a number of testimonies appeared on public Facebook groups by these women, I considered writing a polyphonic memoir to capture their stories – a kind of written form oral history – but I felt deeply uncomfortable about it, because however much I represented them word for word I still needed to write a story and assume a narrative position; and implicit in that narrative position was my power as the person giving form to their narrative, and crafting it as story. I considered a system where they would read everything, giving me consent at every turn. That we would split the proceeds of the book. But this felt tricky, restrictive in lots of ways to my artistic licence, and potentially problematic to have a financial exchange with women who had previously been exploited.
It would have been different if it had been a novel, although I could equally have been blamed if the women had recognised themselves in what I wrote. I was soon to realise that documentary is so much better a form for abuse stories – because the women could speak for themselves. Of course this is not to deny there are still aesthetic decisions to be made, and these women might not be prepared for the emotions that come with having their story out there for everyone to judge and criticise (if they are that way inclined). There is always risk in speaking out; because it is part of being an artist to disrupt the peace, to speak out where others have not.
I will leave you with a James Baldwin quote which I love and which I often share with my students to encourage them to lean into the power of writing and not be afraid of sharing and developing their opinions about the world, particularly if they are at odds with those held by society as a whole…
“Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to them from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it’s true for everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace. They have to disturb the peace. Otherwise, chaos.”
It is strange to be writing this and not expecting a reply, but perhaps you could let me know your views in the comments. And I hope others will join you with that.
It’s been such a pleasure having this correspondence with you, Anna.
With gratitude and love, your pen pal Lily.
This is SUCH an interesting debate, and as I read the back and forth I find my own views sliding up and down the scale - and I am not even a Libran! My own book tells stories of other women as told to me, which is something I feel the weight of heavily. They are not stories of abuse, but there is much loss and grief, and it is something I have tried to hold so carefully. Time will tell how I am judged - although every woman I have interviewed has seen and 'approved' how I have represented them. A couple of things have really stuck out for me this week:
- we are not responsible for our readers feelings
- we must write without fear
I wholeheartedly subscribe to both of those, and as to the matter of 'social responsibility' - well I think that seems open to quite a lot of interpretation. I think we have a responsibility to represent accurately, and always, but always, to 'do no harm' with our words as much as that is possible. Words do hold a great power and I have already been bitten a couple of times by representing an interaction in what I thought was a kind and fun way, for it not to have been received by that. But that is being socially responsible to those we represent if that is something we choose to do. Social responsibility to our readers? Very different matter. I loved Michael Krantz's comment on this series that writers have a duty to offend, to spark debate, to cause ripples. Whilst intentionally offending is certainly not in my nature, I love to read provocative words and appreciate this as the nature of art.
I feel conflicted by this, and yes, slightly scared as I release my words into the world. Is my fear a measure of my sensitivity or an indication that I am feeling societally censored? I'm not yet sure...
Thank you for this x