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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.
She arrives at it after explaining that one of her advantages as a reporter was her ability to disappear into the background. People forgot that she was there observing them, listening to them, remembering what they said. More importantly, they forgot that her presence might not be in their best interests.
I always thought that was the key part of that quote, as Didion knew something that perhaps anyone who has ever befriended a writer ought to know.
Writers notice things, and we store them away. Little details here. Little details there. All stored away. We remember the strange thing you said over dinner. The way you behaved after the third glass of wine. The argument you had, and that secret that you shared. The story about your mother that you probably shouldn't have told. The peculiar way somebody's face changed when a particular name was mentioned.
We might not even be thinking about writing when it happens. But it doesn't matter years later, or perhaps much, much sooner, something resurfaces. A sentence. A gesture. A room. A marriage. And suddenly, before you know it, there it is, sitting on page 147.
Which raises an uncomfortable question. Can you ever really trust a writer?
Enter M
It's a question that has acquired some deliciously literary complications ahead of the publication of Rachel Cusk's new novel, Life of M.
The novel, due to be published on 25 August, concerns a writer who becomes fascinated by an internationally famous actress known simply as M.
So far, so fictional. Except that readers and cultural commentators have noticed something, and, to be fair, they should have, because Rachel Cusk has form here.
M sounds a lot like Natalie Portman, rather. Whoops.
The similarities are striking enough to make coincidence feel increasingly interesting. Like Portman, M became famous as a child. She is an internationally recognised actress. She has children. She models for a major fashion brand. She is small. She reads.
And then there is the relationship between actress and writer.
Portman has been a public admirer of Cusk's work. She has recommended her books and interviewed Cusk in 2022.
Suddenly, M becomes rather more intriguing.
None of this proves that M is Natalie Portman, of course.
Neither Cusk nor Portman has confirmed that she is. Reports suggesting Portman was hurt by the portrayal have circulated, alongside other reports playing down the idea of a serious falling-out.
For now, then, Natalie Portman as M remains speculation.
But Cusk seems to know precisely how provocative that speculation is.
Early in Life of M, the narrator tells us:
“A little while ago, I told the actor M that I was thinking of writing her autobiography.”
M's response?
“Just make it up.”
Which might be one of those sentences you later regret saying to a novelist.
When everybody knows who you mean
There is a strange alchemy that takes place when a real person enters fiction.
Names change. Circumstances shift. Events are compressed or invented. Characteristics belonging to several people might be combined into one character. A conversation that happened in a restaurant moves to a kitchen. Somebody's husband becomes somebody's brother.
Eventually the writer can reasonably say: But I made it up. And they did. Except the person being written about might reasonably reply: Yes, but you started with me. This is where things become ethically slippery.
How fictional does fiction have to become before the person who inspired it stops having a claim on the story?
Perhaps there is no satisfactory answer. Writers have always used people. It is almost impossible to imagine how they wouldn't. We write about human beings, and unfortunately our principal source of information about human beings is the inconvenient fact that we know some.
But there is surely a difference between borrowing somebody's habit of stirring their coffee seventeen times and borrowing the intimate details of their marriage.
Or is there?
Perhaps the distinction only becomes important when somebody recognises themselves. As writers, we experience enormous distance between inspiration and finished character. Writing novels is a journey. We know everything we invented. However, the subject knows everything they recognise. Those are two very different books.
Truman Capote finds out
Few writers discovered the consequences of this more spectacularly than Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood author Truman Capote. For years, Capote moved among some of the wealthiest and most socially prominent women in America. He called them his “swans”.
They invited him into their homes and their holidays. They talked to him. They confided in him. He became part of their lives. Cue Joan Didion's yet to be written warning, as there was only one small problem. He was Truman Capote.
In November 1975, Esquire published “La Côte Basque, 1965”, an extract from Capote's long-awaited novel Answered Prayers.
The story concerned the private lives, affairs, humiliations and scandals of extraordinarily wealthy New York socialites. Capote had changed things, of course, but he had not changed them enough.
The disguises were so paper-thin that people in Capote's social circle could easily recognise the originals. Among those who felt betrayed was Babe Paley, one of his closest friends. The response was devastating and career-ending. Friendships disappeared. Doors closed. Capote found himself exiled from the world that had supplied him with both companionship and material.
There is something almost breathtaking about his miscalculation. Capote seems to have believed that turning life into fiction changed the rules. It was a terrible and unforgivable mistake. His friends believed recognition was sufficient betrayal, and perhaps both positions contain an uncomfortable amount of truth.
Because what exactly had the swans thought all those years?
That one of the most celebrated writers in America was sitting at their dinner tables and not noticing anything?
Whose story is it anyway?
Capote is an extreme example, but the problem certainly didn't die with him. Karl Ove Knausgård built the six-volume My Struggle from the apparently unremarkable material of his own existence: childhood, marriage, sex, parenthood, family, embarrassment, ambition, failure and death.
The trouble with writing your own life in exhaustive detail is that other people keep appearing in it. Knausgård's relatives were not abstractions. They were identifiable human beings who had their own versions of the events he was publishing.
Years later, he acknowledged the impossible contradiction himself. Writing about his family had been cruel because they could do nothing about it. But he also felt he needed to write about his father.
There, in miniature, is the entire problem.
I shouldn't have done it.
I had to do it.
Both statements can apparently be true. Nora Ephron found a funnier solution. When her marriage to journalist Carl Bernstein collapsed after she discovered he was having an affair while she was pregnant, Ephron did what any sensible novelist would do.
She wrote a novel about it. Heartburn turned marital catastrophe into comedy. It is a brilliant read, and I always recommend it.
There is something enormously satisfying about this, particularly because Ephron is so funny. Betray a writer, and you may discover that the problem isn't simply that they will write about you. Bernstein as a reporter must have been well aware of that.
They may get all the best lines. But Heartburn also presents another version of the same ethical difficulty. Two people experience a marriage. Two people experience its collapse.
The question becomes who owns the story afterwards? If something happens to me because of something you did, is it still your private life? Or has it become mine too?
Rachel Cusk has been here before
I said, Rachel Cusk has form here, and she does. This territory is hardly new for her.
In 2001, she published A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother, her unsentimental account of pregnancy and early motherhood. The response was ferocious.
Some readers found enormous relief in Cusk's refusal to reproduce the culturally approved version of maternal bliss. Others were appalled. She was accused of coldness, selfishness and being a bad mother.
What was particularly revealing about the controversy was how quickly the discussion moved beyond the question of whether Cusk had written a good book. The argument became about whether she was allowed to say these things at all.
Cusk had taken an intimate experience surrounded by cultural expectations of privacy and sentimentality and subjected it to the writer's gaze. She looked at motherhood and reported what she saw. Not everyone thanked her for it. For me, as a man and a writer, I see no problem with Rachel Cusk writing her life as she saw it. That's just me.
More than two decades later, Life of M arrives from a writer whose career has repeatedly worried at the boundaries between self and other, experience and narrative, observation and appropriation.
Which makes the possibility that M resembles a real actress feel less like a celebrity guessing game and more like another iteration of a question Cusk has been asking for years.
What are writers entitled to use?
The writer at your dinner table
Perhaps writers are particularly dangerous friends because friendship depends upon a version of privacy that writing continually destabilises.
Imagine telling a friend about the worst night of your marriage. You understand the transaction one way. I'm telling you this because I trust you. But what if your friend is a writer? Perhaps they understand another transaction taking place simultaneously.
Something happened while I was sitting here listening to you.
And that distinction matters, as who owns an experience shared by two people? This becomes even more complicated with fiction. A memoirist at least announces the nature of the transaction. Names may be changed, memories may be disputed, but the reader understands that reality is being claimed.
Fiction offers something slipperier. The novelist can say: It isn't you. And the subject can say: Then why does she have my childhood?
Perhaps the character isn't really Natalie Portman. Perhaps M contains fragments of Portman, other actresses, people Cusk has known, things Cusk has imagined and aspects of Cusk herself.
That is, after all, how fiction works. But imagine recognising your own life inside somebody else's invention. Would understanding the creative process make that recognition less unsettling? I'm not sure it would.
So, can you trust a writer?
Probably. Just be careful what you're trusting them to do. There is something slightly absurd about expecting writers not to use life. Where else are they supposed to get it? Every novelist is a thief of sorts.
They steal voices and rooms and awkward silences. They steal weather. They steal the strange expression on someone's face at a funeral. They steal something overheard on the bus. They steal the friend who always orders the same thing. They steal the childhood bedroom they haven't seen for thirty years.
Then they dismantle everything, mix the pieces together and insist they invented it. Mostly, we let them. Perhaps because the transformation is the point.
Life is messy, repetitive and badly paced. Fiction rearranges it. It finds patterns where none appeared to exist. It gives the devastating remark to the right person at precisely the right moment.
It makes better use of us than we generally make of ourselves. But there is still something unsettling about Didion's warning: 'Writers are always selling somebody out.'
Maybe the betrayal isn't simply using another person's life. Maybe the betrayal is allowing someone to believe you weren't taking notes. Not literal notes, necessarily. Writers are worse than that.
They remember. And yet there is one more person involved in this dubious transaction. Us. The readers. We recoil when Capote betrays his friends, then immediately want to know what he revealed. We debate whether Knausgård had the right to expose his family, while consuming thousands of pages about them.
We wonder whether Natalie Portman really inspired M precisely because the possibility makes Cusk's novel more tantalising. We demand ethical behaviour from writers while rewarding them for crossing the line. Perhaps Didion's warning, then, isn't only for the people who find themselves sitting opposite writers at dinner.
It is for readers too. Writers may always be selling somebody out. But we are the ones buying. And, more often than we might like to admit, turning the pages.