Hackney, Sunday morning: two men flicking through the papers
-- What do you, ah, think about this Julie Myerson woman?
-- Who?
-- You know, this woman novelist, she's written a book about throwing her son out the house for taking skunk?
-- Oh I saw that. Dunno.
-- Minnette Marin doesn’t approve.
-- Who?
-- You KNOW, the Sunday Times columnist, we like her, we saw her at the mayoral debate thing, very elegant, vibrating with anger at Livingstone.
-- Oh yes. What does she say.
-- That you must never trust writers, because they use their nearest and dearest for copy.
-- Didn’t Graham Greene say something like that?
-- Yes, something about a shard of ice in the heart. The thing is, I don’t think anyone writes anything that is complete fiction, it all comes from a reworking of things that actually happen to them, bits of dialogue that they overhear, that sort of thing. But it's not real. So if someone recognises a bit of themselves in a piece of writing, they shouldn't feel violated, because it's probably only some glancing part of their exterior, not the real person.
-- You mean, like, if you were transcribing a conversation between us, you might put a reference to Graham Greene into my mouth, which would be daft, since I’ve never read a word he wrote?
-- Something like that. I might like take the scene and then embroider it, I might even try and construct the whole political point I’m trying to make by using only dialogue between us. So this woman Julie Myerson -
-- You mean, like those scenes you love in the Iris Murdoch novels, where people at parties are identified only by their streams of consciousness?
-- Yes, but that would be too silly.
-- Too silly, yes. What about this woman?
-- I think she’s crossed the line to be honest. Everyone knows and accepts that if you disclose anything to a writer, they will make use of that real stuff, the things that occur in the space round about them. But it’s a different matter to take a real person, especially your son, and make a work of fiction based on them, and then give endless interviews to the newspapers about the pain your son’s drug use caused you, essentially demonstrating that the central point of the novel is not fiction, but that somehow the book isn’t about him really, and how you’re like completely torn up about it, but that ejecting him from your home, a teenage youth, to whom you gave birth, that getting him out your life, was the only thing to do, and it’s about your pain, and that you hope it gives comfort to anyone else in the same situation, when all the time -
-- All the time there’s a real boy out there, who didn’t ask to have his picture and family history posted all over the newspapers?
-- That’s it. But I think it’s too complicated to blog about on CentreRight anyway. I mean, I don’t know them, and I worry about commenting about people I don’t know.
[PAUSE]
-- Look, about that novelist woman, and writing and stuff.
-- Mmm?
-- You wouldn’t write about us, would you?
-- Oh no. No. Course not.
