On stealing other people’s lives

To plunder or not

I was picking up my granddaughter Ruby from her house, and my son in law mentioned reading my recent substack in which I quoted Ruby. As I am wont to do. And Ruby looked up from putting on her shoes.

“Wait. You write about me?” she said.

She is six. She knows I write about her because she made me open the advanced reading copy of my new book and read her the part she’s in and she was delighted. But on this day she wasn’t delighted. I could see her thinking it through. Nana having a box of books that mention her is different than Nana writing something that her father reads on a screen. While it pleases me no end that my son in law reads what I write, this doesn’t please her.

I wonder for a moment if she thought publishing my new book meant only the copies in the box in my house, as if getting the box is the end of it. She is in kindergarten.

A while later, as we were driving, she said very seriously, “You should ask me before you write about me.”

“I will,” I said, “I will ask you if it’s ok before I write about you.”

“I might say it’s ok. I might not,” she said.

“I will ask you,” I said.

Writers are often portrayed as plunderers of the lives around them, stealing the experiences and emotions of their family and friends like so many items on a grocery store shelf, tossing them into the cart of their art with little regard for the consequences.

Writers have always been hard up for content, and more so since social media, always looking for something to throw onto the hungry page. When do you have to stop and ask permission? What should you not write? I have always tried to protect my friends and family, keep their secrets, to only write the good stuff, to ask permission if I’m not sure how something would land. It feels like the kind of courtesy where you don’t post picture of your nieces and nephews on social media until you check with their parents.

Years ago, a sister of a friend called to tell me that she wanted to write a story. The characters in the story she wanted to write were based on me and my son; his disabling car accident, trauma all around, his death.

I was horrified.

“No,” I told her. “No. It is my story. I am a writer. I will write about it.” She accepted that gracefully and I was grateful. Had she been a friend rather than the sister of a friend I might have been more judgmental about the decision to even ask the question, but she was at an additional remove. And she did not take my story.

I dated a writer in college. He wrote a story in which I appeared, only in the story the woman looked different and wore a funny hat. Which I forgave because we were, like, twenty at the time. He didn’t capture anything particularly interesting about me, or revelatory, I just knew it was me because the character said things I had said to him. I was not wearing a hat.

Of course, I am inspired by the life around me, what I hear and see and experience. Individuals inspire things I write. Ruby is a case in point. But I wouldn’t write about something that she would see as embarrassing. And if I am writing about a real person there should be a reason, a point, fictional or not, so they are not just that person saying the things they said in a funny hat. But what if I write something Ruby thinks is embarrassing later? What if I get it wrong?

Recently, the New York Times covered Molly Jong-Fast’s new memoir about her mother, Erica Jong called How to Lose Your Mother. Erica Jong sounds like a very difficult mother, and she regularly plundered her daughter’s life for her fiction, so much so that Jong-Fast “struggled with the disorienting feeling that there are two versions of her” -- the one she lived and the one her mother wrote about her, the one available for anyone to read, strangers who then think they know her from her mother’s stolen fictional history. According to the articles, Jong-Fast’s new book appears to be about her mother’s alcoholism, dementia and general shitty parenting. Retribution, payback, tribute, inevitable response – all of those are discussed in the articles.

Whatever you call it, it sounds brutal. For everyone involved. But it makes me think of the bright exception in my intention not to write negative things about people I know. I, too, had a very difficult mother, and since her death three years ago I find myself writing about her more. I haven’t written a book about her, nor could I imagine spending that much time thinking about her, but when she comes up, I write about it.

A terrible parent fucks you up. And the specificity of their behavior and the way in which it warps and marks you can be interesting, if it’s well written. That’s a fact. Just as almost every PR angle for my new book about discernment wants to circle back to My Dead Kid because, apparently My Dead Kid is a better hook than me being a recovering alcoholic or nun-adjacent or just, you know, writing a book about ancient spiritual practices through a spiritual-but-not-religious lens.

It’s not an accident that the New York Times is running two articles about Jong-Fast’s My Horrible Mother book. It’s interesting, the sidelong glance or rubbernecking stare at the car wreck of someone else’s childhood. We’re curious in that atavistic way we would be if a woman in a gown turned her head and revealed a jagged scar across her neck. Even if the scar were light with age we would be curious. There’s a story there.

When I write about the shit my mother did there is a muscular vigor to the work that is more interesting than the cute stories about my granddaughter. If I’m ever going to publish the memoir I did write about My Dead Kid then I’ll have to reconsider how circumspect I want to be, because there were other people besides my mother who were shitty.

And morally, ethically, writing the truth as you perceive it about the horrible ways other people treated you or the ones you love is different that stealing stories about your children throughout their lives until they become like Jong-Fast who “resented having her private life, including some of her worst moments, repurposed as literary fodder.”

Being as good a parent and grandparent as I can is important to me. I don’t want to plunder the lives of the people around me. I remind myself that I have a whole wide world to reach for and my six plus decades fully lived in that world, and I have a vivid imagination stoked by the thousands of novels I’ve read and movies I’ve watched in that time.

So, this morning I asked Ruby if I could write this, write about what she said about me asking her permission if I wanted to write about her.

“Why do you want to write about me?” she said.

“Well, I write lots of things and I need ideas. And I love how you think. I love how your mind works. Can I write about that?”

She thought about it.

“Ok.”

Maybe that’s the best we can do. And maybe if you try to be a good parent, really try, you’ll be lucky and the stories your kids tell about you will involve compassion, perspective, and even some affection towards you, whether they write those stories down or just tell them to their own kids. If you’re lucky.