Censoring the funny family things
On Mother’s Day my family got together for dinner and that’s pretty much all I can tell you. I can tell you what we ate: fish’n’chips; I can tell you what we drank: orange juice; I just can’t tell you about the very funny thing someone said which would have been a brilliant topic for this column.
I also can’t tell you about the very sweet thing someone else did, which not only would have made a great column, but immediately inspired both an intro and an outro which, as any columnist knows, meant most of the work was done right there.
Anyway, I can’t write either of those columns because they’ve censored me.
In the past wee while there’s been a slow-rolling ban issued by various family members who’ve decided I’m not to write about them.
And, even though some of these individuals are too small and inarticulate to issue their own veto, their parents have done it for them, so the overall outcome is the same – I have been silenced.
Do not think for a moment that I have taken this lying down. On the contrary, I’ve made various challenges, citing things like creative expression and freedom of the press, but nobody’s budging.
Sulking and subtle threats have also got me nowhere, nor has bribery.
Last year I struck a deal which saw me write one last time about the now-verboten subject; I also sneaked in something about another recently, though they read it and were furious. I feigned regret then got thinking about how to do it again.
Pseudonyms were the obvious choice, though they seemed just a bit too obvious, as did changing a few small details about the person. Anyway, I’ve tried the latter before, and it didn’t work.
‘‘It wasn’t you!’’ I shrieked when confronted, but she’d recognised her thinly-disguised self, as did the neighbour, the woman with the labrador and the man down the road who all pointed her out to her. Traitors, all of them. ‘‘It wasn’t you,’’ I whispered. Yet of course it was; we both knew it, and I was sprung.
Arguments about the ethics of autobiographical writing stretch back forever. Anyone who writes about their life will inevitably write about the people in it – no man is an island and all that – but what of their rights?
Julie Myerson’s 2009 novel about her son’s addiction saw her slammed for betraying motherhood, just as Rachel Cusk copped criticism for her tales of divorce and child-raising, later being sued by someone recognising himself in a memoir.
Then there was Heather Armstrong, who last week succumbed to suicide. She was fired when her co-workers found out she was writing about them, then went on to kick off confessional blogging, making both a living and people furious by sharing her kids’ lives.
Armstrong’s husband once joked that having their second child had been good for business. Meanwhile Joan Didion, who considered every aspect of her life as material, echoed that old adage about lying down with dogs by warning ‘‘writers are always selling somebody out’’.
And I reckon that’s true, just as more often than not that, when it comes to writing about other people, ‘‘publish and be damned’’ may well find you actually damned. If you love them, that is.
But fiction is boring; real life isn’t and just for the moment I’m allowed to write about my granddaughter. She’s almost entirely bald, sounds like Chewbacca when happy; sits, rolls and cries when you wipe her face.
Other than that she doesn’t do much of anything, making her the safest subject of all.
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