I wrote my first novel when I was 10, in collaboration with my schoolfriend Penelope McGrath. It was a shameless pastiche of Enid Blyton, set in a fictional English boarding school. Neither of us had ever attended boarding school, in England or anywhere. Our characters had the names of nobody we had ever met and played sports we didn’t fully understand. One tennis game was scored entirely in single digits, like a football match.
Only one character in the novel was drawn directly from life, and that was Natalia, who had arrived from Brazil. I had lived for a time in Brazil, where I had a classmate called Natalia. How strange that it would be this detail that would afterwards make me cringe, rather than any of the glaring mistakes we made. The mistakes I could laugh off, but the use of my own life experience exposed me in a way that I found mortifying. It was my first experience of the peculiar shame of writing what you know.
Of all the difficulties I’ve experienced in writing fiction, this has been the most unsettling. It’s also the most difficult to unravel, because “write what you know” is one of the trade’s core tenets. My latest novel deals with marriage and motherhood, through a central character who is my age and shares much of my experience. This is the furthest I’ve ventured into my own world, and it feels like walking the creaking steps of a haunted house.
The American writer Lorrie Moore asks, “how close to the bone do you cut?” but also and more importantly “whose bone?” Our first family pet was a beautiful springer spaniel called Lola. When I put her in my debut novel, I didn’t change her breed or appearance. I didn’t even change her name, thinking she wouldn’t mind. Towards the end of the book – spoiler alert – the dog is drowned on Sandymount Strand. The writer in me killed my children’s dog. Have they forgiven me? (I know some readers have not.)
READ MORE
My husband is not the husband in my new novel, nor my children the children in it. (I’ve substituted male twins for female twins, and added an older sister.) But inevitably, I’m drawing from the well outside my door, as all writers do. What comes up is my material, but it’s also the stuff of other people’s lives, and herein lies the problem.
In journalism, there are rules around these things. An interviewee can stipulate that something is off the record, and the journalist is obliged by a code of practice to respect that boundary. Formulas of words are used and understood for conveying information and protecting the anonymity of a source. In fiction, there are no such rules, except those we set for themselves.
I did an event in England some years ago with a pair of other writers. Two of us had been born into literary families, while the third had not. He told us that his family was not in the habit of using words for anything other than practicalities. Someone might say “pass the salt” but it was not their habit to use language to explain how they were feeling. Words were not used to recount experiences by forming narrative. I found this quite extraordinary because, in my family, everything was story.
When I think of my childhood, I hear women’s voices, musical and chaotic. They belong to my grandmother, my mother and my two aunts. The men in our family were largely silent, but the women were engaged in a continuous process of constructing stories. It was a call and response, each constantly interrupting the other, adding details and embellishments and shrieking with recognition. The men intervened only occasionally with an unwelcome and ultimately disregarded correction of some fact or other.
[ Kathleen MacMahon: ‘I think women writers are treated like mistresses’Opens in new window ]
My grandmother was fond of stories of human foolishness or weakness, generally other people’s. My mother liked to laugh off her own mortifications by telling and retelling them until their sting was gone. One aunt made her narratives into poetry – disjointed and whimsical. Another loved tragedies so much they had to be rationed, one a day. Always there was story, story, story.
Like the story of the dog who fell into the wet foundations of the new house. There was the story of the visiting child who cried to take the rocking rabbit home and, worse still, the stupid parents who asked if they could. The story of the pretentious photographer who said “fromage” instead of “cheese”, provoking from his subjects a pout rather than a smile. These were narratives of human character and behaviour, elaborated and exaggerated, with key phrases that were repeated until they became family folklore.
My grandmother [Mary Lavin] wrote a lot of these stories down, and they are there now to be read by anyone. It’s a strange thing to find your family stories between the pages of a printed book. Hiding only very thinly behind the characters whose names you do not recognise are: your own grandfather, long dead; your step-grandfather, a former priest, who was much loved; your mother and aunts, first as children, then as adults. They’re all dead now, so there’s no way of knowing what’s true and what’s fiction. Or what is fiction but holds some greater truth. We’re left with a hologram, in some ways more vivid than life itself but ultimately unreliable.
Of all my grandmother’s stories, the one I find the strangest to read is Happiness. It’s narrated by the eldest daughter, who in real life was my mum. She describes her mother’s brave and unconventional approach to widowhood, observing her fierce defiance of life’s sorrows. The daughter is given the knowledge that the mother weeps secretly at night. This was what the writer/mother wanted her children to know. In creating her self-portrait, she puts words in her daughter’s mouth. A boundary has been crossed, and I still don’t know if it’s okay.
When you’re a writer, people often tell you a story and then warn you not to put it in a book. Some of my friends warn me before they even embark on telling a story, knowing already that I will pounce on it and store it away for use. Ultimately, this is my prerogative, but it’s also my responsibility. The publication of a novel is always a nervous time for this reason. The words that were until then only known to me and my editor are now between the covers of a book. Its publication is better described as an opening, with the words released into the air for all to see.
Fiction is not the mask you like to think it is. You can change people’s names and hair colour, you can change their gender or even their nationality, but it’s hard to ever adequately disguise a detail you have harvested from real life. If you’re writing about a character who is funny, it’s hard to pull their humour out of thin air. You must have examples, so you find yourself borrowing from real people, or is it better described as stealing? From whom can you steal?
The writer Lydia Davis spoke about this to the New Yorker magazine some years ago. She knew better than most the problems of boundaries, because her son was the subject of a character in a novel by his stepmother, Siri Hustvedt. “Hurting children is where I would draw the line,” Davis said. “A husband – you can hurt a husband.” She added that he had to OK everything, that he had a veto, but she acknowledged that even this was unfair on him, because it called on him to be gentlemanly.
But, what if you don’t want to hurt anyone? I’ve learned that the world is divided into two kinds of people. The first will be upset if they find themselves in your novel. The second will be upset if they don’t. The Canadian writer, Alice Munro, addressed this in her short story Family Furnishings. It’s a story that always gives me the shivers, because it ventures into this heart of darkness. The narrator is a writer, and she has harvested the life of her father’s first cousin for a story. She has changed some of the details, convincing herself that she’s writing fiction, but the cousin recognises herself in the story and is grievously offended.
I have a horror of upsetting someone I know by crossing a boundary and intruding on their life, however inadvertently. This inadvertence may even be disingenuous, because the writer chooses the words they put on the page, in the full knowledge that other people will read them. My family and friends have been more than generous in allowing me the freedom to write about anything I want, but the fear remains. What liberty do I have as a writer? What liberties can’t I take?
I take comfort in the fact that there’s nothing new under the sun. Even the most specific examples of human behaviour are all in some way universal. No matter how bizarre the quirk you steal from real life, someone will come up to you sooner or later and say “my mother does that!”
It’s the writer’s job to make the connection, proving we are none of us quite as unique as we think we are. But there’s another boundary a writer can’t cross for reasons more practical than moral. The really awful stories people tell me, the unfeasibly, implausibly hideous things that ordinary humans do in the course of their lives will never make it into a book, because who would believe them?
Other People’s Lives by Kathleen MacMahon is published by Penguin Sandycove
