Memories of the Future

Letters of an examined life — letter #15

Writing is about connection. It is about finding those commonalities through shared experience. So when Dr Lily Dunn and I discovered each other’s work we both thought: ‘now this is a woman I could sit down and chat with for hours over a bottle of wine’. Yet geography – the miles between us – made that impossible. So instead we committed to writing letters to one another, to discuss life, memoir, writing craft and more. And in this series, Memories of the Future: letters of an examined life, we have shared those unedited – and often very personal – letters with you, our readers.

For new subscribers, a catch-up, we started this letter-writing series in January and ran for four weeks, eight letters passing between us on a range of topics from motherhood to memoir and the ethics of writing about our personal lives, and how that is both felt by us and received by others. Here we return for another short series.

You can find Lily’s letter #14 to me here, and go further back to catch up on the series from the beginning.

Memories of the Future

And don’t forget that one of the pleasures of Lily and I sharing these letters, is hearing from you. Your comments inspire and further our conversations in letter, so please let us know if anything you have read resonates – or indeed you completely disagree.

And so, to letter #15

Dear Lily,

Thank you for your last letter, this is such a fascinating topic for me and so I was glad to have received your thoughts and the quotes that you sent along with them.

I’m still thinking of this idea of appropriation one week on for two reasons, the first is that - as I know you’ll agree – I love to receive reader comments on our letters, it stretches our thinking even further and gives us pause for thought. One woman wrote in response to my last letter to you and left her comment underneath it. If you have not yet had time to read it, I would recommend that you do. She was concerned about my desire to write a trans character into my novel as a way to understand this movement better, she described this as ‘self-focused’ and went on to write about how she feels that writers have a ‘social responsibility.’

I did reply to her, but I’ve thought about this a lot since. This woman is not a writer by her own admission, she is a psychologist I believe, perhaps she sees patients who sit opposite her on a couch and talk through their feelings about what they have read in books that has offended them. This poses a bigger question for me, and that is, are the readers’ feelings the responsibility of the writer?

You can perhaps guess what my answer will be, but first, let’s test this as a theory. When I write a book, is it possible for me to pre-empt every single life experience of every single reader that comes to my page so as not to offend them? No. And anyway, what is offence? What does this mean? Doesn’t this vary, person to person?

But maybe I’m over-complicating things. But let’s just say if… if it were possible for the writer to know and anticipate the background, life experience, sensitivity and emotions of each reader, would that not be stifling to write for them? After all, is it possible to please everyone? Should a writer even try? Is that what we are meant to be doing when we sit down to write? Do we write to please? To order? And would the writer, weighed down by this huge responsibility, even be able to put down a word if they did?

I don’t think so.

As a writer of non-fiction, I have a responsibility to facts. That is where my social responsibility starts and ends. I am not responsible for readers’ feelings – they are.

If the facts that they are reading are simply too painful, then the book has a cover that they can close. There are enough books in the world to put one down and choose another if you choose not to expand your mind in one particular direction.

I believe a writer can choose for him or herself whether they have a ‘social responsibility’ and if this is something that is a priority for them. It is a personal decision, and cannot be something that is insisted on by others. Perhaps they will choose instead that making art is a priority for them, or even the right to offend. That is their right, too.

I have always been responsible in my non-fiction writing life because I have ghosted many marginalised voices: black, brown, those living with dementia, those living with other disabilities, and those who are victims of some of the cruelest punishments that society (or rather the patriarchy) can dole out to women. Those voices that I have chosen to give a platform, have been speaking about issues that I cared very deeply about and so it was important for me to get them right. In those cases yes, I felt some social responsibility, but more broadly no, I do not think writers have a social responsibility.

A responsibility to make art, yes.

A responsibility to craft language and string together beautiful words, yes.

A responsibility to tell a good story, whether that is fiction or non-fiction, yes.

But no more. If someone is offended by that well, I’m afraid that’s on them or, see my previous comment about closing the book. Maybe you think me unkind for thinking this, or at least writing it down, but then, you are entitled to your opinion.

The second reason this has been on my mind, and the reason I feel so strongly about this, is because I have spent the last few days reading Salman Rushdie’s new book, Knife. Rushdie is a man, who you will remember, suffered a savage knife attack that nearly claimed his life – and instead took his right eye. The reason for this was that someone, who read just two pages of his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, was offended by it and decided to carry out the orders of the fatwa that was placed on his life more than three decades ago – quite possibly by someone else who had read only two pages of his work, I don’t know.

When Rushdie was attacked, back in August 2022, I saw on Twitter writers expressing their utter horror at what had happened to him. Many of them were people who could not tolerate the opinions of those who disagreed with them, or those they had decided were ‘unkind’. They were the same writers who had unfollowed, blocked, or attempted to cancel other writers for this subjective view of unkindness. And it made me very confused indeed.

This — what had happened to Rushdie I thought — is the very extreme end of what happens when you insist on policing someone else’s words, something I had watched those same writers do. And yet, they were not able to see that their own criticisms of writers for having an opinion at odds with their own were just one mentally unstable potential killer away from a blade reaching another writer.

Let me make one thing clear, writers don’t make people unsafe, people with knives make people unsafe.

A writer should not have to worry about losing his life – or an eye – because of fictional stories that they make up in their heads and commit to a page.

To insist a writer has a social responsibility in what they write would be also to insist they must face the consequences if they fail to stick to that responsibility. And who is going to police that? Who decides that this ‘responsibility’ has not been fulfilled? Who decides what punishment is doled out once the threshold for that has been reached?

And now look at me, when I almost criticised you in my last letter for not sticking to answering me about fiction, I have gone off course myself and see how political this letter has become? But I’m afraid this week I can write of little else.

I feel very strongly about free speech and the right to offend, and the right to make art that does both. And if people take away that right from us, to create and explore stories, to educate ourselves in other worlds and cultures, then this creative life will not be a fulfilling one, it will be abandoned by me for one, and so many others. I already know good writers who have abandoned their work for this very reason, this fear of their words or the opinions of their characters being policed.

I know this particular series of letters is drawing to a close now, and I have enjoyed as always writing to you. And so, I will leave you with these important words from Rushdie’s book:

‘Freedom everywhere is under attack from the bien-pensant left as well as book-banning conservatives.’ He laments that too many have come to accept that ‘protecting the rights and sensibilities of groups perceived as vulnerable take precedence over freedom of speech.’

Where does that leave us? With more writers in danger, I would suggest.

I wonder, do you see that losing freedom of speech also means losing freedom of imagination?

Do you agree that the job of sitting down to the blank page – whether to write fiction or non-fiction – is challenging enough, without attempting to write to please?

Do you have any advice for people stifled by their fear of causing offence by writing outside of their own culture and experience? Because I do, and it would be this: forget everyone else for now, and just keep putting one word in front of another — do not stop.

I would be interested to hear whether we agree.

With love and thanks for your letters to me, as always,

Your penpal,

Anna

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