A question for the memoirist, quoted in "Maggie Smith Tries to Make the Divorce Memoir Beautiful/Her new book, 'You Could Make This Place Beautiful,' is an exploration of what happened to her marriage after she became a well-known poet" (NYT).
I clicked on this because I thought I was going to read something about the 88-year-old actress, Maggie Smith, but it's about a 46-year-old writer with the same name. She's most famously the author of the "official poem of the pandemic," "Good Bones." The poem contains the line that is the title of the new book, "You Could Make This Place Beautiful." I think it's a pretty good poem, so go to the link and read it.
Anyway, having determined that this article was not about the actress Maggie Smith, I ended up wanting to blog it because of that question from the audience at one of her book-tour appearances. It's the classic ethics question for all writers who use their own life as material.
Smith answers:
Ms. Smith flashed a serene smile. “I so respect and appreciate that question, and um, no, I did not feel the need to ask anyone for permission,” she said. She added: “I can’t make decisions in my life based on fear.”
You see the rhetorical move. The qualms about ethics are recast as fear, so that it becomes courageous to resist agonizing over the feelings of others.
Things to flash a serene smile about.
The NYT piece continues:
In the book she describes how, soon after her husband left the house he shared with her and their two children, she emailed him a draft of an essay she’d written about their breakup for the Times’s “Modern Love” column. He responded, she says, with a bossy litany of proposed changes — tiny correctives to details — designed to cast him in a better light. Told by her editor that the changes would “weaken” the piece, she rejected most of them.
I'm distracted into thinking about E. Jean Carroll's memoir, which told a story of a sexual encounter in a dressing room in the lingerie department of Bergdorf Goodman. Carroll is testifying in her tort case against Donald Trump. I suppose he'd have had a bossy litany of proposed changes if he'd been shown a draft of the memoir in advance of publication and that the editor would view the changes as weakening the piece and the memoirist would reject them.
We're told that Maggie Smith did not send the ex-husband a draft of the memoir. If he'd wanted a chance to participate in the process, he shouldn't have been so bossy about the essay. More fundamentally and usefully: He shouldn't have had an affair and then walked out on his wife when she discovered it.
Here's one of the comments at the NYT:
reminds me of a writing teacher I had, who when asked about the ethics of writing about people who wronged you, said, "if they didn't want to be written about, they shouldn't have done it! let them write their own book."
Posts
41 comments:
Some wife of some American poet supposedly wrote: Poets' wives lead rotten lives.
Another example of speaking power to truth.
"...E. Jean Carroll's memoir, which told a story of a sexual encounter in a dressing room in the lingerie department of Bergdorf Goodman."
"an ALLEGED sexual encounter..." FIFY
MarcusB. THEOLDMAN
I'm reminded of your stock photo. I got the impression your ex-husband didn't ask for permission to sell an image of you.
"Good Bones" sees the world as half-shitty. Well, Smith's attitude about cooperating with other people creates that world. Not seeing that every interaction with another human is a beautiful, distinct bubble is what creates that world. Not everyone's experience is half-shitty.
Yes! It is better to have details wrong and cast someone in a bad light, than to "weaken" the piece! Wanting to correct the record as someone publicly smears you is being bossy! You go, Maggie!
Ha! Remember the Ban Bossy movement?
What are the ethics of showing us the “bossy litany of proposed changes.” I think that would be interesting reading.
Just saw an old interview with Capote where he mocks the outraged reaction of people who appeared in his last book.
"Who do they think I was?" Capote smirked "I"m a writer"
"Bossy corrections" ha. I'll use that on my wife.
She's most famously the author of the "official poem of the pandemic," "Good Bones."
Everyone had a different experience with Covid and the response to it, but to me, this is analogous to having written the official poem of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment.
Her poem seem nice enough, but poetry isn't my field.
There's no ethics to it but it does define what kind of person she is. Call it inconsiderate.
Allowing Trump to present a defense during the impeachment would have weakened the case against him. It's self-evidently true. There is a reason that the 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta was almost completely ignored. Those in power now view it as an 800 year mistake, like that that so-called "Enlightenment."
The ethics of authors using events from their own lives is an old one. I don't know of any author who asks permission or has qualms about not asking permission (the closest I have seen is seeking permission from victims where that victimization is a major part of the book, but that's about as close as they come). You're supposed to write what you know. What you know best is your own life.
That said, in indirect fashion, Ms. Smith did ask her ex-husband's permission, he withheld his permission, and she published anyway. No wonder she wants to dodge the ethical aspects of her behavior--she tried to have it both ways and it didn't work out.
Apparently in Scandavian countries, personal memoirs are quite abundant, the most famous being Karl Ove Knausgard's multi-volume book My Struggle. By the last volume, the first volume, which was largely about his father and reads in places like a classic monster tale, has been published. Hence, the last volume deals with the publication process, including sending drafts to people mentioned. His father does not get to comment, since he has died, with his death being gruesomely detailed in the first volume. Karl Ove's uncle (his father's brother) responds to the request for comment with an email headed "I have been raped." Karl Ove's wife is given the transcript to read on a long train journey, and, if memory serves, soon after checks herself into a mental institution. Given the trail of destruction left in his wake, the last volume reads a bit like the memoir of a serial killer. The books were a big hit in Norway, sold extraodinarily well.
There are huge disparities in power involved in situations in which the established writer reveals the details of personal relationships. It bothered me with Updike, Roth, and Bellow. It bothers me with Smith, too.
It's not about law. It's about morality.
This blog has a well-documented history of disfavoring the use of children in political efforts. I suppose the people who do this should ignore the ethics and say they wont live their lives in fear of disfavor. That doing so would "weaken their piece."
That's an interesting phrase. Doesn't matter if the piece is truthful or accurate. All that matters is strength or weakness in the context of "will my newspapers readers enjoy it?" If accuracy and truth take away from the end result of pleasing the readers, then we know what must give way. Kind of like the decades old alleged rape.
Not saying the dude's attempt to shape the facts was accurate, but if not, she should have said that he was adding details that made it more fictional. Moral to the story is don't marry a writer if you don't want them to give a one-sided account of your life to the readers she needs to prop up her ego, especially if you are the rogue giving her lots of juicy material to work with.
Poetry, the destroyer of marriages. Run, don't walk, away from it.
Strange, I thought settling scores was the whole point of being a writer.
"She added: “I can’t make decisions in my life based on fear.” You see the rhetorical move."
We do see that move. But she can make decisions based on egocentric cruelty--or at least, vengeance.
"the editor would view the changes as weakening the piece and the memoirist would reject them"
Maybe the memoirist would, but a smart editor? A more Trumpian twist might strengthen a text. Add some CAPS here and there, and you got a bestseller.
"if they didn't want to be written about, they shouldn't have done it!"
But with most writers it doesn't matter what you "have done." They will use anyone for material as they like. Hence I proposed adding a third dimension to the hot-crazy matrix: make it a hot-crazy-writer matrix. Gentlemen (and ladies?): proceed at your own risk.
This post also makes me appreciate Althouse's own tact about her personal life and the people in it.
"In the book she describes how, soon after her husband left the house he shared with her and their two children,"
Why is this written in such a weird clunky way?
Thanks for the citation to "Good Bones" --I guess. What an absolute downer of a poem. Is it a "pretty good poem"? Well, everything in the field of poetry is pretty damn subjective, so "good" means little more than "it does not instantly induce projectile vomiting."
That said, it made me sad and angry in a new way, with a well-organized series of half-overlapping words and ideas, like a system of trenches dug by sappers approaching a castle. And, yes, the poem broke through the curtain wall of complacency and indifference; made in the heart a new hole, one filled with pain, one edged with a persistent, stupid belief in beauty.
"She added: “I can’t make decisions in my life based on fear.” You see the rhetorical move."
The move only works if the mover is a woman.
Were she a man, the feelings of the ex-wife would overrule any other authority he might invoke.
We have been trained to believe all women and not question "her truth".
My father, a somewhat crazy man and author of several published novels used to say, "People don't want the truth. They want a good story."
So wait, do we still believe all women? Getting harder and harder, isn't it?
Some wife of some American poet supposedly wrote: Poets' wives lead rotten lives.
Where every prospect pleases, and only Man is vile.
"He shouldn't have had an affair and then walked out on his wife when she discovered it."
Well. He shouldn't have had the affair, since he was married. Maybe he shouldn't have married. Certainly, he shouldn't have married her. But are you saying he should have stuck around and faced the music? She sounds like she could be pretty musical.
Memoir = Fiction
I read somewhere that Hemingway savaged acquaintances he didn't like by putting thinly disguised versions into his short fiction. True? I have no idea, but it is one of those slanders that sticks in the mind as possible. Nor do I doubt many authors do that, Rowling, for instance.
I was sympathetic to the husband until the disclosure that he cheated and left. Blow up people's lives and they owe you no say.
It depends on whether one is writing fiction or non-fiction. That's why works of fiction (novels, movies, etc.) have the standard disclaimer ("Based on ...but any similarity...yada-yada...is purely coincidental"). And poetry, regardless of how personal it is, is elaborate fiction "based on" one's own yada-yada.
I happen to know numerous well-known writers and poets whose novels, short stories, and poetry have intricately reconstructed personal characters woven into their works. And not only have they never mentioned getting permission
of any kind, but I also can't even imagine them thinking they should.
But then, I'm not a lawyer. Or an ethicist.
reminds me of a writing teacher I had, who when asked about the ethics of writing about people who wronged you, said, "if they didn't want to be written about, they shouldn't have done it! let them write their own book."
This honestly sounds vastly more interesting than most memoirs. Take a collection of people who feel hard done by in recent "literary" memoirs. Have a talented writer or set of writers interview them and tell their own stories, artfully framed so as to humiliate or otherwise hold up to ridicule the person who tried to embarrass everyone by writing a memoir about his personal relationships. This is already a bit of a mini-genre in fiction (e.g. Wicked vs. The Wizard of Oz), so I think there could be some appeal. But my impression is that ordinary people tend to whine too much and pull their punches, lacking both the art and the nastiness of a good writer. Which is why you'd need good writers on the other side to coax it out.
I mean, sometimes the memoirist isn't actually in the wrong, but I tend to be suspicious of anyone who decides to write and edit hundreds of pages about his own life, and all the moreso if he ostentatiously takes responsibility for this or that bit of horribleness, knowing the apparent admission creates an impression of fairness. How much worse his actual conduct must have been!
The only exception for me, really, in this deep mistrust of literary memoirs, is situations where there's a clear outside reason people ought to know the story, e.g. Churchill on the war in the Soudan, or Frederick Douglass on his life as a slave. There, the purpose is public and obvious, not some weird psychological rationalisation and score-settling.
I guess I’m old fashioned. Details about marriages, spouses and/or ex-spouses are not for public consumption. Writing about them for compensation is something I find rather disgusting.
There are power imbalances and there are power imbalances. During the actual marriage, the husband--he was a lawyer and probably made more than the average poet--probably held the high cards so far as who did the dishes and cleaned the bathroom. After the marriage went sour though, and it came time to conduct the post mortem, she was the one to write up the official autopsy report or, anyway, the one that people will remember.....I don't know if she practiced what she preached. Did it make the world a better place for her kids to know the details of their father's deficits?
“ "an ALLEGED sexual encounter..." FIFY”
This fix just weighs the sentence down with redundancy and bogus lawspeak.
I’ve already accounted for not knowing if it’s true by saying “tells a story.” That’s concise and clear.
“I'm reminded of your stock photo. I got the impression your ex-husband didn't ask for permission to sell an image of you.”
He didn’t sell it. It’s just a family photo that my son scanned and uploaded and I blogged. Then other people used it as if it were a stock photo. No one got paid but various people have used it for free.
In my 9000 blog posts about a variety of subjects i have tried to be very aware of how my wife, my sons, or my friends and coworkers would feel about what is being written. It's because I value relationships.
You might say I've been quite woke about that.
I stand by the statement that all writers are seeking to expose themselves to a great audience. Bravo. Take it all off.
But political hit pieces writers want to expose another.
Yeah, you might notice I don’t blog anything negative about people in my life. Even the positive is minimal.
Blogger chuck said...
I read somewhere that Hemingway savaged acquaintances he didn't like by putting thinly disguised versions into his short fiction. True? I have no idea, but it is one of those slanders that sticks in the mind as possible. Nor do I doubt many authors do that, Rowling, for instance.
Many of his novels depicted friends in negative situations. He is said to have waited in the bar across from Cafe De La Paix to meet the friend who was trashed in the book. He knew he had slimed Robert Cohn and thought he might be angry.
@ Michael K
That prompted me to do a little research on "The Sun Also Rises". I loved this bit
Donald Stewart, who appeared in the book's pages as "Bill Gorton," was astonished that Hemingway was even passing it off as fiction: it was, in Stewart's opinion, "nothing but a report on what happened … [it was] journalism."
Heh.
It’s sad to hear they got divorced.
They deserve each other.
Updike was rueful and Bellow was grumpy: Roth is the only vengeful one of the lot.
Post a Comment