Misfits & Me by Mandy Sayer

Author:Mandy Sayer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NewSouth Publishing
Published: 2018-08-27T16:00:00+00:00

A Writer in the Family

(2005)

When Charles Dickens’ mother finished reading Nicholas Nickleby, she remarked to her son about the character of the matriarch (who happened to be based on herself): did he think anyone as silly as Catherine Nickleby could have existed? As an author who borrowed freely from characters in his family, Dickens got off lightly: his mother obviously didn’t recognise herself in the book.

I occasionally feel sorry for the relatives of writers, including my own. Even though most authors protest and say they ‘appropriate certain traits’ and ‘combine characters’ (which is often true), we all know that the morphine-addicted mother in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night is based on the playwright’s own mother and that Christina Stead’s novel The Man Who Loved Children is basically a memoir with the names and locations changed. The first dramatic moments a budding writer experiences are usually in the context of their family: the first characters they know will be their parents and siblings. The first fight they hear will probably be at home.

Most writers are ruthless when it comes to appropriating material, and think nothing of using any experience from the past or present to help them complete their work. William Faulkner went so far as to say that the serious artist is completely amoral, in that they will ‘borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done … If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesi-tate; the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies’. In an article, Kristin Williamson (wife of playwright David Williamson) complained that in Travelling North her husband painted unflattering portraits of herself and her sister. ‘Now I don’t tell him everything’, says Williamson, ‘in case he uses it’.

So if an author who borrows heavily from their family isn’t as lucky as Charles Dickens, how do they do their work well and maintain a relationship with their relatives? American crime novelist Jim Thompson waited until his father was senile before re-creating him as the hapless financial failure who stumbles home every night stinking of ‘whores and whiskey’ in the 1939 story The Drilling Contractor. Graham Greene enlisted the help of his progressive mother, who read Greene’s books aloud to her invalid husband, always omitting the passages that might offend him. Australian author Nikki Gemmell attempted to publish The Bride Stripped Bare anonymously, mostly, one suspects, so her partner wouldn’t read the portrayal of the novel’s cuckolded husband. Some authors, like memoirist Augusten Burroughs, simply change their own names, thus sparing relatives any potential embarrassment.

Occasionally, the fear of embarrassing a relative can tame a writer. Two years ago, at dinner, a writer friend of mine told me he couldn’t write about sex until his mother died. Three months after our conversation, she conveniently passed away. Since then, however, my friend has not written one single erotic word.

Perhaps the best kind of family for a writer is one that is indifferent to their books.

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