I recently heard an interview with the writer Orhan Pamuk in which he was asked - had it changed his life much, winning the Nobel Prize? I'm a little bit in love with Pamuk these days (those big sad eyes, those labyrinthine torture gardens of the mind...), and listened eagerly for what he would say. Oh, dear Orhan, please don't be a schmuck, please don't tell us how great it is to be totally famous. 'I thought it wouldn't change my life at all' he said, 'but I was wrong, it did. My family started speaking to me again.' If you've read his ravishing Istanbul: Memories and the City then you know the many reasons the Pamuk clan had to take umbrage. And yet this deeply honest, self-searching, wildly sensitive account of le petit Orhan and the people and places that helped make him is one of the best things I've ever read in the genre 'portrait of the artist as a young monster'. Pamuk spares neither himself, nor his mother, nor his father, nor his big brother (who claims most of it's made up anyway), he shows a little bit of reserve towards a former girlfriend, which I find rather gallant of him. Is it fair to treat people like this? And, if it isn't fair, what on earth are we to write? How are we to write?
It's a question of genuine moral import, and every writer must wrestle that angel on her own. I make it a rule not to say anything in print I wouldn't say to a person's face, at least if I had the gumption to face them. It's of some comfort to know that when you do 'put' people into books, they often don't recognise themselves, but of course others may, and draw their attention to it. Then there are those who insist on seeing themselves where they are not. And those who do recognise themselves may call you on it. I'd say as a general rule that ex-lovers are fairly safe territory, as long as they're firmly ex. They're unlikely to risk a painful rendezvous merely to complain that it didn't happen like that and you're telling it all wrong. But a neat vivisection of the writer's Christmases Past is sure to bring the roof down around one's ears. Of course, if, like me, you already enjoy a relationship with your family on the outermost edge of the deeply estranged and totally dysfunctional then by all means go for it. What have you got to lose? You might even win the Nobel Prize.
