Writing is about connection. It is about finding those commonalities through shared experience. So when
and 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 #13 to me here, and go further back to catch up on the series from the beginning.
And don’t forget that one of the pleasures of Anna and I sharing these letters, is hearing from you. 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.
And so, to letter #14
Dear Anna
I see that you had to pull me back from the brink of memoir, as I was stuck in the mud of it, despite having spent a week working on my novel!
I actually laughed at myself when I went off on that week, because the books I took to read were not novels, but memoirs. I seem to be caught up in an endless stream of reading proof copies for quotes, which is good, but also a little bit limiting if you want to have a discussion about the novel. I have not read novels, or written fiction for years, so in a way I am not really equipped to answer your questions.
Although of course all writing is an artefact. The minute it appears on a page it is something separate from its maker, and begins its journey of being designed, crafted and turned into story – so you could argue that all writing is fiction. As David Shields famously wrote,
‘the moment you start to arrange the world in words you alter its nature. The words themselves begin to suggest patterns and connections that seemed at the time to be absent from the events the words describe. Then the story takes hold.’
Much good memoir involves a heavy dose of the imagination and much fiction comes from life. But we know this…
Your main question revolves around appropriation, and yes this is a political question, and one that I have mixed views about. I will try to untangle them here on the page. But before that I also want to respond to another aspect of your letter – the imagination; and surely one of the most satisfying reasons to write of fiction is to have permission to invent stuff, as explore the parts of life that we are curious about… the pure bliss of immersing yourself in a world that is fresh and new and begging to be understood.
I often use a quote by Virginia Woolf in my teaching of memoir, but which easily applies to fiction, too –
“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.”
This doesn’t strictly mean write what you know, but it does mean write what you see and feel, what you are interested in and what moves you. What you want to spend the best part of the year or maybe two thinking about throughout your waking and sleeping hours. Place and setting is important in my novels. These places are invented, but I have been lucky to have parents who lived in special houses at certain points during my upbringing, so I know how a house can hold a mood, how ghosts can be a part of that too.
You may not know about sea sponges but there is something about them that catches your curiosity, enough for you to want to get the books out on the kitchen table and tell your precious daughter dinner can wait just a little while longer.
But how far can we push this curiosity? Can we write about people that we have had no contact with – can a white privileged heteronormative man write from the point of view of a black lesbian?
On the one hand you could argue that because of the democratic nature of memoir it lends itself to the marginalised story. Memoir thrives on the real-life story that is not so readily known, and it gives minority writers a platform from which they can tell that story. By comparison fiction should lend itself to the good writer who has a generous dose of empathy, humility and integrity, and excellent research skills to boot, to tell the story – any story – that interests them. Well, I know it’s not as simple as this, but the danger perhaps is the broad sweep of rules, the yardstick that all writers should abide by for fear that if they don’t they will end up being cancelled, or dragged through the ringer that is the dark side of social media.
But there are plenty of examples that might have been called appropriation, but have been accepted by the reading public! The one that comes to mind is The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, a stunning story about the quintessential British experience written by a man who was born in Japan and moved to the UK when he was five. I watched the film again recently and wondered if part of its success is that Ishiguro is an outsider. He is able to stand on the peripheries and look in, not wholly implicated. This perhaps gives him a certain level of dispassion, and a unique perspective. Would it be written differently by a British person who had had experience working in the service industry? They might not have had enough distance to see the workings of that industry, and the nuanced buttoned-up Britishness that Ishiguro captures so well.
I do wonder though if the issue of appropriation is more to do with questions raised by culture wars and the legacy of colonialism than it is about good or bad writing. One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, by Ken Kesey, from the point of view of a Native American, and The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner, from the point of view of a neurodivergent character, are masterpieces of literature, but there are no excuses for blackface. But coming back to the writing – as we must always come back to the writing – there is certainly a way of writing ‘what we don’t know’ well and doing it badly. None of us should be leaning into stereotype.
Without getting too tied up in knots, I wonder what you have to say about all this!
Forever grateful for your words, your pen pal, Lily
Hello- thank you for this. I have wrestled with this topic a long time.
I am white. I grew up in Scotland. I also spent most of my twenties and thirties doing research and running projects with rural communities in Nicaragua and Myanmar.
And so those place became tied up inside me along with my Scottishness. And things happened in those years which impacted how I saw the world.
I have written a novel with a cast of characters - 5 of whom are Nicaraguan. I felt the story had to be set in Nicaragua and I felt that I needed a variety of real people characters - not a couple of stereotypes - to tell that story well.
I wrote this a few years ago - before the appropriation debate became so big. I believe in what I have written - but as I am seeking an agent - I worry about it in the current context. And I may not have written it tbh within the current context because of that concern.
I believe strongly in addressing the colonial systems and prejudice which created the inequality underlying this debate. I have spent a lot of my professional life working on this.
I also believe strongly in writing stories which touch our hearts and doing that with the imagination and empathy and research which allows us to imagine characters with different lived experiences from us.
I know the world is unequal. I know there is a lot of misappropriation. It happens in foreigners writing about Scotland all the time. But I think if we don’t engage or write about other people’s experience we also lose the empathy and connection to the world which is needed to truly change those systems.
Thank you for writing, Lily. I love the David Shields quote. Lots to consider. I am very curious as to what our readers think of this topic. I hope they will share their thoughts in the comments.