writers are always
On a different night, after a different party, A and I were sitting on his back porch. It was morning already, somehow, maybe an hour after sunrise: bright, not yet hot. We hadn't slept. We were talking about writing about people, or trying to. I kept losing track of the conversation, which is one I've been having with myself for so long that putting it into words for someone else felt impossible. You know how that is? When there's no way to get someone to see all of the context.
I was probably also still drunk.
Anyway, now, writing this, I have to decide, because there are two ways I could tell this story. One of them involves talking more about A and why we were having this particular conversation. The other version elides him, either mostly or entirely. I mean, I could have just started with: I think a lot about what it means to write about someone.
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It's weird to say this because it wasn't very long ago, objectively, but when I started keeping my Tumblr in 2009 it was a different era of the internet. My friends were on Facebook, which we'd joined when it was still pretty much brand-new; they weren't on Twitter, and Instagram and Snapchat didn't even exist. There was not yet really the idea that a majority of private citizens would want to maintain public-facing internet personas. So when I wrote about them, it really just seemed like a matter our courtesy to use their initials instead of their names.
At this point it's not hard to see the connection between the M I'm talking about on Tumblr and the mmpopkey I'm @-ing on Twitter, but I'm used to it as a style and so it stays. It also helps to remind me that writing about someone doesn't mean I own them or their stories-- that I am, in fact, only borrowing both, and that in most cases I haven't asked for permission to do it. It helps me draw a line for myself: between the person whose life I am involved in and the way I'm using them to say whatever it is that I've decided to say.
When I was writing the book, I told myself that it wasn't about anyone. And it isn't, exactly, or, it's much, much more about me than it is about anybody else. But that also doesn't mean that other people aren't in it. Some of them are people I haven't spoken to in years: I was several revisions deep before I realized that one character's family drama was stolen directly, whole-cloth, from the situation of a friend's high school boyfriend. Lorelei's best friend, Zoe, is not really anything like M but the texture of our friendship is there in the book: the thing you trust even and maybe especially when you do not trust yourself.
It's easy to pretend that I'm being ethical; that having rules about doing something wrong mitigates the wrongness of it. Recently I have started thinking that the only way to believe that what you're writing isn't autobiographical is to have forgotten that you ever knew the story you're stealing from. And the only way to stop stealing is to stop writing.
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A is a writer, too. He also told me it wasn't a betrayal to write about people, not as a rule. It feels like one, though, a small one, a real one, this tiny letter he won't read unless I send it to him. That small hours conversation, the two of us sitting close surrounded by this huge white light that meant it was day already, not dawn. I was still drunk but I knew what I was doing. I was taking a small moment out of the air between us and saying: this is mine now.
"You know what Didion says," I told him. "Writers are always selling someone out."
He shrugged. "Do you want to go to sleep?" he asked.
I think he thought that the way I was talking meant I wasn't going to write about him. I guess I wanted to think that way, too. Instead it was only just that I was trying to figure out exactly why I was going to, and how I was going to do it.