What if you trusted a writer with your story?

Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer and the betrayal at the heart of nonfiction

Imagine spending months talking to a writer. You tell them things you wouldn't normally tell people. They meet your family. They read your letters. They listen sympathetically while you explain the worst thing that has ever happened to you. Eventually, perhaps inevitably, you begin to think this person understands you.

Then the book comes out, and you discover that the writer you thought understood you has turned you into a character you barely recognise.

That is the nightmare sitting at the centre of Janet Malcolm's The Journalist and the Murderer. And after everything we've been reading about writers, truth and the people who become material, I suspect Malcolm is the writer we've been heading towards all along.

Can you trust Truman Capote? In Cold Blood, true crime and what happens when murder becomes literature

A little while ago, I asked a question that probably isn't advisable for somebody who spends quite a lot of time writing about other people.

Can you ever really trust a writer? Rachel Cusk's Life of M got me thinking about it. Joan Didion provided the warning. And Truman Capote wandered briefly into the argument, having spectacularly demonstrated what can happen when a writer's friends discover that the funny little man at their dinner table has been paying considerably more attention than they realised.