Category: Writing

On upsetting people

A sister rang to complain, I’d written a piece on my blog in which I’d used the names of living people.

I told her I had invented these names, but given it was a piece of memoir, why didn’t I explain I had made them up? she asked.

And can she trust me not to violate her privacy by using her name in any of my writing?

It’s thorny territory and I’ve been here so many times before, you’d think I’d get used to it. This ghastly position of knowing I upset people with my writing.

Not intentionally.

I make up names all over the place and do so out of respect for people’s privacy but also in order not to appropriate someone else’s identity.

People still feel betrayed.

As Helen Garner argues: ‘Writing …  like the bringing up of children, can’t be done without causing damage’.

Like most people, I prefer to be liked. I do not relish the rancour of people towards me, especially those who matter, my friends and family.

Nor do I enjoy the sense I get from time to time that I must choose: either my writing or my relationships.

Is it okay for me to put my writing out there given it might upset others because they feel I have misrepresented them or their story, even as I’m doing my best to tell my own?

‘You can’t write things without the people you write about feeling betrayed,’ the journalist Margaret Simons says following a conversation with Helen Garner.

So why does it make us flinch to be written about?

According to Garner, ‘it’s not so much the revelation of fact, as the feeling that somebody else is telling your story, and stating something without the justifying tone that you use yourself…You feel stripped and bare and you can’t say “Oh well that’s just me,” in that cosy way that one does.’

When someone writes about you, they use their own words, their own impressions. They look at you from the outside, whereas you can only see yourself from the inside. You can only imagine how you might come across.

In a recent radio interview with Philip Adams, Helen Garner challenged the idea that writers have no right to tell other people’s stories.

‘Who owns the stories anyhow?’ she asks. ‘Stories are not just bits of stuff we pick up on the street and can possess.’

Stories float around and are there for everyone.

Everyone and anyone is free to pick up these stories and make of them as they will.

That’s what writers do, they gather together the impressions that come to them as they write and try to shape them into a coherent narrative.

Whether it comes under the rubric of fiction or memoir, it’s still an effort to shape a story that resonates for the writer and hopefully will also resonate with readers who will likely experience the story differently from the way the writer first envisaged it.

I have written a memoir about aspects of my childhood. It’s been a long time in the making. It has undergone many transformations, but in the process I hope I have distilled something of the essence of what it was like for me as a child growing up in my particular family.

I write about my experience from my perception knowing full well that the way I see the world will be different from the way my siblings may have experienced events.

They will see the past from their vantage point, and that’s fine.

We all have the right to tackle our stories in our own way, without breaching one another’s right to privacy. Hence my use of fictional names.

I write to convey something of the emotional truthfulness of my life growing up during the fifties, sixties and early seventies in Melbourne, Australia, not as a statement of facts, but as a story.

I’m writing in an effort to explore what it was like for me as a small child, an adolescent and as a young woman in the flush of first loves.

I hope people can read my work with an open mind, and not get stuck in merely trying to establish facts.

Facts matter when we’re talking about concrete events and people and places. But when we tell stories, although the factual skeleton might need to be firm, the flesh around those facts will be different depending on who tells the story.

This is my version. And it’s only one version. There are likely to be many others. But I expect only a few will get written.

Some might be passed on by word of mouth; others might be transformed into visual art, into music or any other form that can convey something of the story.

Not one of us holds a monopoly.

I am no revolutionary

1968, the year of revolutions, only I don’t know it then.

I’m sixteen years old in a brown uniform that has enough pink to make it the colour of mushrooms. I spend my days dressed in this uniform, as my parents have shipped me off to boarding school.

To be more precise, my oldest brother has made the decision that I should leave home along with my younger sister and together the nuns have taken us in so that we can have a roof over our heads while we continue our studies and in time get a place at the university.

The convent roof is terracotta red only I can’t see it from within the school grounds, except low down near the gutters where the tiles on the main building slope down. Otherwise you need to stand well back from the building out on the street in Vaucluse Parade to get a better view.

Even from here, you have the problem of the high fence that surrounds the school to keep girls in and to keep intruders out, and the trees.

There are trees along most of the perimeter of the school, trees that act like prison walls only some of them can be climbed.

Not that I climb them. I am no revolutionary.

In fact, my way of getting along in this life of boarding is to conform. Not only to conform to the expectations and wishes of my teachers, most of whom wear the black habit of nuns, but to be a sycophant, not that I know this then.

If I I had known, I’d cringe to the roots of my hair.

I am excessively polite to everyone. I make it my business to get to know the name of every girl in the school from year seven up. Not so difficult given the school is small with some two hundred pupils at any time.

I have worked out that the best way to get along is to love everyone, like the bible says: ‘Do unto others as you’d have them do to you’. That way you’re safe even if underneath it you hate someone to bits.

You never let it show.

Maria Rizzo hates me. I recognise this from the sneer in her voice whenever she is forced into an encounter with me, as when we are on a shared project together.

I recognise it from the way she pulls her friends aside to let me pass during recess. She does not want to include me.

Much as I try to keep on loving Maria Rizzo, I find it hard.

She is dark haired and olive skinned with the look of someone from the Mediterranean and I can see that she might struggle, too, like the other girls who come from Greece and Italy, the other girls whose skin is not pale like mine and whose hair is dark and rough in texture, a roughness that can make such hair hard to tame.

The girls from Greece and Italy in 1968 in a convent school in Richmond, Melbourne are the most unwanted ones, apart from Juliana Kibble who might well have been Australian, though her second name suggests someone foreign from England.

Most foreign of all, she walks around the school and keeps to herself.

No one wants to go near her.

Is it that she lets off a bad smell?

Her uniform looks clean enough, cleaner than mine, but she has a look of neglect. The look of someone, irrespective of uniform or her dark hair tied back in a neat ponytail, of someone you want to avoid, or else she might contaminate you with something of her abjection.

And you would become one of the outcasts, the unspeakables.

No, it is better by far to go around the school with the biggest smile plastered on my far too thin lips, making sure to keep them closed so that my teeth do not show, otherwise others might see that some of my teeth have turned the yellow brown of rot.

I befriend Juliana Kibble. I am kind to her even though she makes it hard work by not reaching out to me or to anyone else in the schoolyard.

She sits on the edge during basketball matches and while others huddle together in groups to applaud the home team when they play against visiting schools, Juliana looks as though she lives in a world of her own.

People keep a wide arc around her.

In 1968, a year as long as any other, with the usual summer, autumn, winter and spring, the seasons stay the same for me apart from changing from the mushroom brown linen school dress with its short sleeves and white collar for warm weather, into the navy tunic and white blouse topped off by a dark blue jumper and blazer for the cold.

We are not permitted to wear our blazers by day, but only when we are out on the street or during religious ceremonies.

Some girls try to keep their blazers on during class time because the rooms are Antarctic cold but they displease their teachers even as the nuns can keep warm under layers of fabric and fingerless gloves and the lay teachers wear winter coats and scarves.

‘Character building’, I hear the teachers say and go along with them in my attempts to build my own character into someone who is strong. Someone who can withstand the cold and the hatred of Maria Rizzo, along with the eerie silence of Juliana Kibble and the insults of the mathematics teacher who only likes girls who are good with sums.

I smile at this mathematical nun when she hobbles past, crippled by arthritis in her fingers and toes.

‘She’s only like that because she’s in pain,’ my sister tells me.

But my sister is better with numbers than me, nor does she choose to spend her days trying to make everyone like her.

Her job is easier. Or so I think in those days of revolution when I should have bucked the system.

When I should have tried to find a more purposeful way.

Instead, I figured if you’re in prison, then the best way to get along is to befriend guards and fellow prisoners alike, and not offend a soul, even if someone like Maria Rizzo takes offence at your overtures.

No revolutions here.