Whose Responsibility is it Anyway?
Trust as vital in memoir
Because I’m in full teaching mode and in light of the last few days - if you know you know - I’m thinking about responsibility and trust in memoir.
A lot of discussions around memoir focus on memory as being the vital component of memoir, but what if it’s actually trust? When I took The Last Days to my agent, he didn’t ask for evidence I’d grown up as a Jehovah’s Witness, and he still never has. My publishers, Penguin Random House, never asked either. If someone tells you they were a thing or have done a thing, it’s not often you raise an eyebrow, especially not if they’ve committed that story to paper.
Think about your own life, how easy is it to prove the facts of it? If you’re telling a story of the past, how can it be fact checked? These thoughts were very much with me when I wrote Ava Anna Ada. It centres around two protagonists telling different versions of the same story, in part because I was aware that if anyone else told the story I was telling in The Last Days, they’d tell it differently. What they wouldn’t tell differently were the facts, the support structures of the book, the David Copperfield crap as Holden Caulfield called it. But it’s these supports I couldn’t prove. We don’t have paperwork for our lives. We might have pictures, ticket stubs, the clothes we wore and the books we bought, but there isn’t really supporting evidence.
When Penguin Random House say they undertook all necessary checks in relation to Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path, what is it they really mean they did? Based on my experience and the experience of other writers, they wouldn’t fact check Winn’s account, but instead undertake a detailed legal read based on the book.
When you sign with a publisher you are not asked to testify that everything in the book is true, instead included in your contract is an indemnity clause. This is the clause as a writer you want to pay attention to, since this is who assumes responsibility in the event of legal action related to the publication of the book. As a writer damning a global organisation to high hell, this is a clause I paid a lot of attention to, as I did the hefty legal report that landed in my inbox just over a year later. It was this report my indemnity hinged on; if I complied with suggestions then PRH assumed responsibility, if I didn’t, then it fell on me. There is also the debate around whether or not the book would be published if I’d unwisely dug my heels in - there’s a reason advances are staggered, and a feeling that a manuscript is only a book once it’s safely on the shelves.
This legal report focused on defamation, since it’s the thing that is most likely to get a memoirist sued, you cannot in your truth-telling endeavour defame anyone. Defamation law is complicated, but in short, if you’re saying something about someone else that could cause them to lose status or income, you need to have the receipts. In many cases, people don’t have these. Lots of things in life, but especially the most complicated and ugly, we don’t report, or often even recognise. A lot of students I teach approach memoir with the idea it can unburden them, or that their freedom of speech guarantees them a free pass to talk about anyone - it doesn’t. For this reason, a legal read can feel like an encroachment on your ability to tell the truth. It is essentially a type of interrogation of the text. I’d have found anything like that related to my life earlier in the process really invasive. When you’re writing memoir one of the most vital relationships you nurture is with your editor. My editor at PRH was incredible in coaxing the story out of me, her and my agent know things about me no one else on the planet does - could I have told them those things if I thought they’d ask for cold hard evidence? I’m not sure I could’ve.
Because privacy law is also important in published work, a robust legal read also doesn’t guarantee you can talk about someone else’s medical condition or their sexual experience. Although, interestingly not the privacy of minors given it’s a legal guardian writing about them, something I think is an interesting oversight and one I wonder might change in the future, especially when the children of memoir writers writing about their children come of age. I wrote about influencer’s children in Ava Anna Ada, and how exploitative this situation is, and while not the same, questions certainly arise around ethics of what a parent is allowed to publicly disclose about a child, who given the power dynamics of the situation, is always a vulnerable person. And given how what they’re allowed to disclose about a child would be different if that child were an adult, there seems to be little thought given to the fact that one day the child will be an adult.
Legal reads can be difficult. Mine made me a better writer. Mine also meant there’s a disclaimer at the front of my book saying some scenes are fictionalised, because to comply with defamation and privacy law and to protect both myself and my publishers, we felt this was the best way forward. This doesn’t mean the book isn’t true, it just means sometimes you have to tell the truth in a different way to protect other people too. Those scenes are so few I can point exactly to them, and explain the stylistic and legal choices behind them, I just can’t in public - feel free to ask privately. But the simple fact remains, the circumstances of the book are true.
And yet it’s these circumstances that are the hardest to prove, it is these circumstances every memoirist presents to an agent and then a publisher, and until Sunday, it’s these circumstances publishers understandably wouldn’t have thought to check. My grandmother always said to me life is stranger than fiction and really if I told you right now I’m half South-African, half-Scottish, half-Jewish, half-Christian, with sixteen siblings (at the last count) and a father who converted from Judaism to Islam for unstated and possibly nefarious business reasons after money laundering for the ANC and the PLO would you believe me?
Last week, a publisher would have. This week, less likely. Now the trust has been broken by one writer, whether or not the accusations are true (but when you know journalism law, you doubt they’re false), it’ll be interesting to see how the publishing landscape alters to reflect this breach.