Something I’ve started thinking about since I started publishing this newsletter is the right you have to tell a story that involves someone else.
Obviously, this is something that happens all the time, in everyone’s lives. Rare are the occasions that a story is told, which involves someone else, while that person is physically present to chip in and correct the misconceptions or exaggerations about what happened. Think: on the phone to your friend, complaining about the actions of an errant boyfriend, a boss, one of your other friends who made an insensitive passing comment. Unless you’re an incredibly honest and morally upstanding person, the story is always going to be skewed from your viewpoint. Even if you are an honest and upstanding person, you can only see the story from your perspective. It doesn’t make much of a good story otherwise. But it means that people get the edited highlights of the scenario; the ways in which you were wronged, or the ways in which you triumphed, a great idea that you had, etc. There is no point at which the other actors in the story can swoop down and say, ‘Actually, it was my idea to arrive at the airport three hours early, and it was your fault we missed the flight’.
My friend once had a very bad boyfriend. They were together for a long time, but I only met him on a couple of occasions because this was in university, and he was studying elsewhere. On the occasions I met him I had very little interaction with him, because we’d be in a huge group at a club or a bar. So most of my perception of him was formed from the way she would talk about him, and she had almost nothing nice to say. He phoned her when drunk, calling her names (although I think ‘cunt’ doesn’t quite fit into the bracket of name-calling); he didn’t make any effort with her family or friends; he refused to discuss their future together even though they had been in a relationship for years. Etc, etc. Etc. It went on and on to the point where none of us could understand why they remained together, and eventually stopped giving her advice because she was either unwilling to or incapable of taking it. It all came to a head one memorable drunk night that ended in her slumped on the floor of someone’s living room, sobbing: ‘I just hate that you guys don’t like him!’
Of course we didn’t fucking like him. All we had heard was that he was a dick, and she was the one who was our friend, and was constantly miserable because of his actions. But obviously, her side wasn’t the whole story. It’s just that no-one was interested in hearing his side.
She’s with a very nice boyfriend now and this guy is a distant and unpleasant memory. But I think of it often, and especially now when considering the creative ownership you may or may not have over a story that happened to you, but didn’t only happen to you.
When I first started writing episodes of things that had happened in my life and putting them on my website (PLUG), I changed people’s names. Genius, I thought. Only the people who have heard these stories firsthand will realize who they are about. I then named the stories after the places where they happened. Somewhat less genius, as it turned out, as I had a barrage of messages from people who had obviously clicked on the place where they had known me or interacted with me, done some basic logic checks, and realized who the stories were about. For example:
‘Adam, my lone friend in this house of societal rejects, was mostly useless to me in that I only saw him for about an hour a day. He and his girlfriend would leave the house at around 10pm every night, go to one of the rapidly shortening list of bars from which they had not been banned, return at 4am, throw up the night’s consumption in the upstairs bathroom, and would not be seen until around 4pm that day, when they crawled from his room like orcs, made coffee in his French press** and scuttled back upstairs to read the Brothers Karamazov, which I only recently discovered he had been mispronouncing as the Brothers KaraZAmov for the entirety of our cohabitation, despite the fact that he presumably looked at the cover every day.’
** This was evidently written during the time in my life where I thought owning a French press was the height of sophistication, otherwise I would have just said ‘made coffee’. I eventually got a French press and was disappointed to discover it did not change my life in any meaningful way.
‘Adam’ got in contact upon reading this, and luckily thought his mispronunciation and my mocking of it was funny. But you never know where someone’s line is, what they’re insecure about or worried about, or what they would be comfortable having written about them on the internet, albeit to a fairly small audience. What if ‘Adam’ was dyslexic? My mocking of his mispronunciation of Karamazov wouldn’t have been particularly funny then. In the newsletter about my fear of vomit, I texted my sister before publishing to check she didn’t mind me telling the food poisoning story. To me, it was a side plot in the larger narrative of my lifetime of anxiety, but I wasn’t in that bathroom with her – I don’t know how she felt about it. I don’t know if it sparked some kind of similar anxiety for her, or less dramatically, just whether or not she wanted the internet reading about an extremely unpleasant night she had one time.
It seems to me, from listening to various podcasts about dating and relationships and just generally other people’s lives, that most people believe that the statute of limitations on other people’s behaviour expires the second they do something to you that you don’t like. As soon as that person wrongs you, or ghosts you, or spurns you, then everything they’ve ever said/written/confided to you is up for public debate and ridicule, no matter how personal or heartfelt that thing was at the time, or how long it occurred before the act of wronging/ghosting/spurning. An entire relationship is distilled down into its last moments, and that taints everything that came before. Think about it: dating stories you hear about girls with daddy issues or boys with abandonment issues. You don’t ever hear about the time that the boy lay with his head in the girl’s lap and talked about how his whole life was shattered by his parent’s divorce and that’s why he has a hard time trusting people. Nope: the way you tell his story is shaped entirely by the prism of your experience with him, and you can say whatever the fuck you want. Entire human beings are used as punchlines to jokes, past conquests are dubbed ‘Thigh Tattoo’ or ‘Wednesday guy’, so called because things didn’t work out between the two of you and you’re mad about it.
One of my writing teachers once told us a story whose moral was: as soon as you put your writing (substitute for art/music/thoughts etc.) out into the universe, you lose all control over what people think about it. And you have to reckon with that. Sure, you can publish another piece explaining what the first piece meant, if you felt it was misunderstood, but you’ll always have to grapple with the fact that someone thought that about it when they read it – that there was something in the work that prompted that emotion, whether or not it was intentional. An example from my own writing: someone in my workshop once informed me that he loved ‘all the mentions of hair – very Samson and Delilah’. I had literally no idea what he was talking about and no idea that I had mentioned hair more than it was normal to do in a standard piece of writing. This is an amusing example, because it makes me sound cleverer than I actually am, but it could go a number of ways. And if you (or I) decide to relinquish the tight grip you have over people’s thoughts about you and let them make their own minds up, that’s your (or my) decision. But I wonder sometimes whether or not we have the right to decide that for someone else. And if you don’t – how can creativity and morality possibly co-exist?
One good thing:
That’s right, the format is back! For this week only, probably.
This week my one good thing was this text exchange about how Sex and the City does not talk about 9/11. I hope you’re all continuing to enjoy this SATC fan fiction masquerading as a newsletter.
One bad thing:
From the apartment that brought you Eight Roaches in the Space of Half an Hour!, we now present: Mice. Top tip from me to you: there’s a reason people live in new builds, and your hankering for a brownstone stoop is not going to help you sleep at night when you have vermin running through your apartment.