We've been here before. In fact, Joan Didion is where much of this journey began.
In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, she gave us the sentence that has followed us through almost every writer we've encountered since: “Writers are always selling somebody out.”
Writers explain things. Even when they don't announce it, it is one of the basic pleasures they offer us. It's why we love to read. They take the mess of experience and give it shape. They decide where a story begins, which details matter, and how one event relates to another.
In nonfiction especially, we tend to assume that if a writer has spent years researching a person, interviewing people who knew them, and examining the evidence of their life, they will eventually be able to tell us who that person really was. But what happens if they can't?
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.
Hunter S. Thompson drove into Las Vegas with a boot full of drugs. At which point the idea of journalistic objectivity was probably in some difficulty.
In In Cold Blood, Capote took the murder of the Clutter family in Kansas and transformed it into literature. He created suspense, reconstructed conversations, moved between perspectives and, most troublingly, made us understand Perry Smith.
Capote removed himself from the book, but he was everywhere in its choices. He decided where we looked, what we knew and when we knew it.
So after writing about In Cold Blood, I was left with another question. What happens if the writer tries to get out of the way?
Thirteen years after Capote's book appeared, Norman Mailer offered an answer. Sort of.
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.
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'Writers are always selling somebody out.'
It is a wonderfully typical Didion sentence. It's cold, precise and just self-aware enough to make the betrayal sound almost professional.
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