Is everyone copy?
My mother didn’t want me engaging with therapy for the same reason she didn’t like the idea of me doing stand-up comedy.
You’ll just talk about me, she said. You’ll make fun of me.
I promised her that I had sadder things to bring up in therapy and funnier things to say in stand-up. She’s not entirely wrong about the fact that I like talking about her. Here I am, talking about her.
This subject is often on my mind when I write, though. When does someone’s story in your life – their words, actions, presence – stop being theirs alone and start being a part of yours? What are the parameters for artistically churning someone else’s story into something worth a read, a watch, a listen?
Woody Allen explores this idea in the film Deconstructing Harry. Truman Capote and Nawal El-Sadawi toy with the ethics of novelizing true crime. Gay Talese shows us you can write a fifteen-thousand-word profile about someone you’ve not even met.
Everything is copy, says Nora Ephron. After she dies, her son Jacob Bernstein makes a whole documentary about it. He looks at the major events in her life that she turned into copy and the way she drew the line at her illness, then reflects:
I think at the end of my mom’s life, she believed that everything is not copy. That the things you want to keep are not copy, that the people you love are not copy. That what is copy is the stuff you lost, the stuff you’re willing to give away, the things that have been taken from you. She saw everything as copy as a means of controlling the story. Once she became ill, the way to control the story was to make it not exist.
Everything could be copy but that doesn’t mean that everything should be. Maybe it wasn’t a means of taking control. Maybe she didn’t write about her illness because she didn’t think it was interesting.
I considered my own parameters. Everything is copy so long as it’s honest, funny and interesting. I later found that not all of them needed to be true. Sometimes it’s copy because it feels important. Sometimes it’s selfish and sentimental.
When I was in journalism school, Patrick said that everyone likes the idea of a profile but nobody likes the end result of a well-written one.
I deliberate on this when I write about people in my life. I hold up in my mind my observations of them – their words, mannerisms, merits and faults – up against my understanding of what they know, what they can’t handle knowing and what they wouldn’t want the world to know. It’s a calculation and a moral negotiation that I do and re-do all of the time.
I don't find it worthwhile to commit everything that is honest, funny and interesting to public writing because loyalty sometimes comes before honesty and artistic freedom. That, I can live with for now. It would be an entirely different matter if public interest was involved but that's a whole other can of worms.
Pray tell, is everyone copy? E-mail me your thoughts :-)