Is it ever morally okay to write about someone else’s intimate trauma?
In a previous life, with a different name, I was a daily newspaper journalist. I was competitive, hungry for the front page, and ruthless in my chase for it. A good friend who worked for the then Health Department once confided in me that traces of faecal matter had been found in a popular brand of pate. POOS IN PATE! the headline screamed the next day. Another distressed hospo friend mentioned that her downtown bar was offering shots with live goldfish in them. GOLDFISH SLAMMERS! The RSPCA organised a march down Willis Street, the goldfish came off the menu, my friend lost her job.
I was proud of those articles. Did I care about the fallout for my friends? Not enough to pause and put distance between the source and the me, the writer. Not enough to consider not writing the stories. Certainly not enough to risk someone else getting the scoops.
The frisson has always been the same, when I’ve heard a story ‘with legs.’ But at some point, empathy kicked in hard. Life delivered moments of intense vulnerability, loss of control over the way I, or people close to me, might be treated or portrayed. I’ve seen people destroyed between the jaws of a mauling media pack. The pack moves on, the damaged get up, tend to their wounds, and resume life. Or not.
* By now everyone knows the "Who is the Bad Art Friend" scandal in the US. A recap: two writers - Dawn Dorland and Sonya Larson - are fighting over artistic appropriation. They’re going at it hammer and tongs, which of course over there means they’re suing each other. At the risk of confusing body organs, at the heart of the issue is a kidney.
Kidneygate started when Dorland donated a kidney to a stranger, then shared details about the act with a private Facebook group that included Larson and other writer friends. Unbeknown to Dorland, Larson wrote a short story about a kidney donor seeking positive recognition for the act from the kidney recipient. The story – which allegedly lifted material from Dorland’s Facebook communications – took flight, leading to suits, countersuits, and massive social media interest.
At the heart of the controversy is the question: when it comes to writing about personal experiences, who owns the story?
*
My latest novel Loop Tracks germinated just after noon on a Friday, late in 2016, in a swish Japanese restaurant in Auckland. We were old friends having a rare catch up. All the details of that afternoon are as clear in my memory now as they were on the day.
We talked about the shame and the rage and deceit of our own teenaged years, how girls at school sometimes disappeared
A sashimi platter with scallop, kingfish, tuna, salmon and snapper. Edamame beans and grilled eggplant and agadashi tofu. Quite a lot of Man O’ War Pinque rosē. We chatted about our jobs and our families. The conversation turned to teenaged pregnancies – one in particular, the daughter of a person we knew – and then we floated on the good ship Man O’ War back to the 1970s. We talked about the shame and the rage and deceit of our own teenaged years, how girls at school sometimes disappeared, without explanation, for six months. How they’d eventually return but not really – they were no longer the sassy, sexy ones with boyfriends. Hollow, sad in a way you couldn’t quite put your finger on. There were rumours of babies, but really, who knew? You would never ask.
Someone mentioned 1978, when politicians closed the abortion clinics in New Zealand and girls had to fly to Australia for legal, safe terminations. Then one of my friends said this. "I had to fly to Sydney. The plane was delayed on the tarmac. For hours."
This is how a novel begins: a tingle in the spine, like shorting electrics desperate to earth. There was a pause in the conversation, and then I said "What a great set up for a book." My friend and I looked at each other, raised our eyebrows, and the conversation moved on. My buzzy brain was already imagining the novel’s first paragraph. Hers could justifiably have been thinking why the hell did I say that.
*
Embarking on a new novel is like committing to a marriage. You have lots of those tingly moments – but they need to be tested. The best way to test them is to try and forget about them. I’ve forgotten about the idea of a novel based on someone’s tinnitus turning into a world-class symphony, for example. Feel free to steal that gem. But the idea of a plane delayed on the tarmac at Auckland Airport for hours, with anxious pregnant girls and women on board, was – like the plane itself – going nowhere. I obsessed about its possibilities. Eventually, I rang my friend. Could we talk some more, about that thing, I asked her. She said yes.
No one would ever know who she was. I would protect her identity
A week on, we sat at my kitchen bench. There was more seafood. Bluff oysters. It was early evening and we had the house to ourselves. I told her I wanted to write a novel that had, at its genesis, her experience on the plane. Would she let me? Would she share her story of that day, and give the work her blessing?
I wanted to make certain things clear to her. No one would ever know who she was. I would protect her identity, no matter what – and this would include the way in which the story was told. Her experience would spark the tale, but the narrative would be fiction. If I couldn’t achieve that, there would be no book.
She could have said no – I would have respected that decision. Moved on, waited for the next tingly thing. She said yes. I pushed record on my phone, and she began to talk.
We covered a lot of ground that night. The before, the during, the after. We talked about reliability of memory, how certain silly facts stick (the sandwiches on the plane were triangles) and others – the big ones, like exact dates, exact months even – slip away.
Now and again, I’d glance down, to make sure my phone was capturing our words. This conversation would be the only one we would have. I wouldn’t put her through this again.
A few days later, I sat down and transcribed her words. I listened to their pulse. I heard the hammering heart of a young girl facing enormous trauma on her own, with unbelievable bravery. And I heard the silent spaces in between the beats – the woman she’d become; wise, kind, generous. Hesitant at being dragged back to an experience she had put behind her.
*
It took me close to five years to write Loop Tracks. I was busy with other things, including a move from Auckland to Wellington. There were moments, too, when I faltered. It wasn’t only my friend’s experience I was writing about. It was the collective experience of many thousands of New Zealand women. What about the triggering effect for them? This hesitation eventually focused my thinking around why I was so determined to write this story: decades of state regulation of female bodies. Decades of legislated shame, sorrow, secrets.
I have friends who carry deep scars..who have tried to contact children they were forced to adopt out
I was never a pregnant teenager. But I have friends who carry deep scars. Many who could never raise the thousands of dollars needed to get to Australia to safely end an unplanned pregnancy. Some who have tried to contact children they were then forced to adopt out, and been rebuffed. One who was forced to have a baby conceived by incestuous rape. When the child grew to be a man and discovered his genealogy, he killed himself.
All the manufactured shame, all borne by the victims. Shame that has conditioned women to bury their pasts; it suits the patriarchy nicely that they feel that way. I hear from some of them every week. They write to say thank you for Loop Tracks.
Ironically, in the end, the writing of the novel was made easier by the fact that I had never experienced any of the trauma I was writing about. I had no choice but to transition quickly in the plot from fact to fiction. My friend gifted me the details around the flight delay; I had to make the rest of the story up.
*
Right from the outset of the "Bad Art Friend" story of Dorland and Larson story, one thing was missing: mutual empathy. Dorland considered Larson a friend; Larson has revealed that she and the other writers in the cohort found Dorland needy. Class and racial difference further flavoured the drama – Larson is Asian-American, Dorland was raised poor, abused and traumatised, but has been tainted, via the fictional short story, with white saviourism.
When the frisson of a story presented itself to Larson, she couldn’t resist it – an understandable impulse. But the subject matter was bound up, for her, with the source of the story – needy Dawn Dorland. From there, the situation deteriorated: the pack chose its alpha and moved in on Dorland.
I needed my friend’s permission to use her experience as the genesis for my novel. At a practical level, I needed her knowledge. But at the level of being a decent human being, I needed her to trust me to protect her identity. To leave her no worse off at the end of the experience than she was at the beginning. This is what sustains a friendship: mutual respect, empathetic equality. In their litigious pursuit of each other’s reputations, and in their race to the courtroom doors, neither Dorland nor Larson emerge with any of these qualities on show.
*
My friend and I met sporadically over those five years – usually in the company of others. We rarely spoke about the novel, but she knew it was underway. She read an early draft of it, partly completed, and I waited nervously for her response. What would I have done, if she’d hated it? Asked me not to publish it? I would have abandoned the project – just as I would have abandoned this article, had she not approved of it. But she was happy with the shape of Loop Tracks -- where it had come from, the way in which her experience had been the catapult for a narrative of collective experience.
I sent her the final version of the novel. Did she want the dedication changed, or removed? The initial changed?
Finally, in late 2020, it was done. And it was time to decide to whom the book would be dedicated. I had two people in mind. Dame Margaret Sparrow, who had helped me with research in the very early stages of the project. And, of course, my friend, whom I identified only by the initial of her first name.
I sent her the final version of the novel. Did she want the dedication changed, or removed? The initial changed?
No, she said.
I’m happy to do whatever you want, I replied.
I’m all good with it, leave it as it is.
*
Loop Tracks was launched on a cool evening in June, in Wellington’s enormous Unity Books. A lot of people came, I think. Book launches are a blur of nerves and adrenalin; a sea of dear faces – people you like and people you love and people just there for the wine and cheese.
On that night, I talked about about the conversation in the Japanese restaurant. I romanticised it, calling it a gold nugget sitting between me and my friend – a precious thing that she could have claimed back as her own, but instead gifted to me.
My friend was at the launch. She’d travelled a long way. We met beforehand, shared a quiet moment. I told her once more how deeply grateful I was for her help, her generosity and her bravery. How Loop Tracks belonged to both of us. And how, during the imminent launch, as I talked about her, I would not catch her eye.
I’ll look at everyone except you, I said. We won’t cope, if I look at you.
I delivered my line of gratitude to her in the crowded bookstore and it took every ounce of willpower not to turn her way.
Loop Tracks by Sue Orr (Victoria University Press, $35) is available in bookstores nationwide.
