anonymized characters and the rights of authorship: lessons from "The Trials of Alice Goffman"

The Gideon Lewis-Kraus New York Times Magazine story "The Trials of Alice Goffman" has me stirred up here in the dark this morning.

My thoughts spin. Let me settle them down.

The deck beneath the headline reads, "Her first book, 'On the Run'—about the lives of young black men in West Philadelphia—has fueled a fight within sociology over who gets to speak for whom." The story goes on to tell the tale of a young University of Pennsylvania graduate (and daughter of a famed sociologist) who spent years immersively studying and writing about "a group of young black men in a mixed-income neighborhood in West Philadelphia, some of the low-level drug dealers who live under constant threat of arrest and cycle in and out of prison."

The book quickly became a sensation. Goffman, and her TED talk, became a sensation. (I remember all of this well; I was watching.) But soon enough detractors spoke. Why did Goffman burn most of her transcripts and notes? Why did Goffman feel the need to write with such colorful flair about individuals and scenes that had been notably (extravagantly?) anonymized? Why did she focus so hard on individuals, when sociology, her field, is about societies? Why did she seem to break (or merely ignore?) so many academic rules? What are the consequences?

And did she have a right to tell this story?

Lewis-Kraus does an excellent job of laying all of this out for the reader—contextualizing the book, contextualizing the field, contextualizing Goffman herself. It is the sort of story the Magazine is best at—big questions, roiling fields of study considered through the lens of a single person or event.

The story is fascinating, illuminating. I'd recommend it to anyone, and I'd especially like to recommend it today to memoirists, on the one hand, and to anyone who is caught up in the many prevailing debates of Young Adult literature, on the other.

Briefly:

In Handling the Truth (and in all my talks, and through all my classes), I express deep concern about anonymized subjects—the extravagant decorations some memoirists apply to the others in their stories. Through Notes to the Readers, we'll learn that most everyone in the book (save the first person I) is a composite—names have been changed, scenes, appearances. At the very least, this is distracting. At the very least, we're being asked, as readers, to apply a filter I'm not sure we readers should have to apply to a genre that's already highly suspicious. Ah, we think, as we meet a composite character, This person is not real. Ahh, again: this person is not real. And if this person isn't real, if she really isn't a twin and she really isn't wearing a marigold dress and she really doesn't talk with a nasal quality, what else about this scene isn't real? What are we supposed to believe? Is there truth inside this memoir?

(Often, of course, there is truth inside that memoir. But the reader has to find it.)

Last week I read a memoir for review that is truly lovely, but as a memoir built of composites, I felt a distance. Yesterday I read Paul Lisicky's memoir of friendship The Narrow Door. It is not a memoir built of composites. Lisicky names names (names many readers will know). When he can't fully name a character he uses an initial. When he really can't name a character (one single case), he gives her a fake name and tells us he is doing that. Not a composite, then. Just an indirect pronoun. There's a difference. We're not distracted. We don't have to put up our truth-seeking guard. We can relax into the story.

Goffman's story, as told by Lewis-Kraus, is, in part, a cautionary tale, about what happens when authors go to extreme lengths to disguise the real people at the heart of their stories. They lose track of the disguises. They start writing extravagantly. They put themselves in the way of critics who wonder about embellishments.

Now, onto the question: Who has the right to tell this story?

I can't answer—I don't know—if Goffman overstepped. But the issue has me thinking about a topic that is lately swirling through Young Adult literature. The right to ownership of story. Can a man write convincingly as a girl? Can a woman write convincingly as a boy? Does the American living in California have the right to tell the story of a child of Haiti?

Young Adult literature, obstensibly, is written for teens. It is written to reach the hearts and souls and minds of young people on the brink—young people facing bullies, uncertainty, challenge, any number of things; young people who are in need of compassion. And yet, among Young Adult authors and advocates, a storm has broken out. Swirling questions. Who is allowed to tell this story?

Fiction is not memoir, of course it's not. But it still requires fidelity to emotional truth. I can't, for example, pretend to know what a young woman of 1876 might think as she sets out on a hot day for the Centennial grounds. I can't pretend to know what a young man living in East Berlin in 1983 feels, or what a young man living anywhere at any time, for that matter, feels. I can't pretend to know what it is to be rich. I can't pretend to know what it is to be a pregnant teen stuck in southern Spain with a band of gypsies and a cook. I can't pretend to know what it is to be losing my mind to a neurodegenerative disease. 

I can't pretend any of that—but I can, and I have, deeply researched. I have gone to these places, I have talked to these doctors, I have read the transcripts, I have sought real people out, I have interviewed the graffiti artist, I have walked the old Centennial grounds. I have used all the resources at my disposal to find out what it might have been like, and then I have written fiction—relying on my heart, my experiences, my imagination to lead me forward. Because I may not have lived the circumstance of some of my characters, but I have lived their fear, I have lived their distrust, I have lived their anxiety, their anorexia, their panic, their kind of sadness, their kind of loss.

I have lived their feelings, I have researched their worlds. Have I had the right to tell these stories?

It's a question, as I say, that swirls. It's a question any writer of fiction might be asked: What gives you the right to write about a martian? What gives you the right to write the character of Don Quixote? What gives the right to imagine yourself on a boat with a Bengal tiger? What gives you, Marilynne Robinson, the right to write the character of Lila, or you, William Faulkner, the right to all those voices inside As I Lay Dying?

I have been married, for thirty years, to a beautiful Salvadoran, and boy has he told me stories. Do I have the right (with his permission) to faithfully reinvent his stories?

What gives you the right to imagine anyone who isn't you?

If we don't have the right to responsibly (and I need that word inside this sentence) write characters who aren't us, then we don't have the luxury of imagining, which is to say empathizing with, characters who are not us.

We need to empathize with the people who are not us.

There are many questions about Goffman's story. I have not read her book. But as we ponder the accounting of Lewis-Kraus let us also ponder the difficulties we encounter when we actively disguise the truth but call it truth.

Conversely, let's think about the difficulties we encounter when we ask writers who choose to delve into (and write of) other worlds, whether or not they have the right. If they have done their research, if they are writing for the right reasons (which is to say, not to capitalize on a trend, not to capitalize on a market, not to capitalize on potential headlines or income), if they have given these projects their heart and their minds, perhaps they have the right.