In the introduction to her semi-autobiographical novel Heartburn, Nora Ephron writes about one of the main lessons her mother taught her: that “everything is copy”. Ephron writes, “As a result, I knew the moment my marriage ended that someday it might make a book — if I could just stop crying.”
I was reminded of this precept while watching Sex Education, of all things; specifically, the storyline where the main character’s mum, a sex therapist played by the delightful Gillian Anderson, uses her son’s sexual dysfunction as the basis for her book. And this prompted the thought: is everything copy, though? Do writers really have carte blanche to mine the lives of those around them for copy?
The 2021 version of this adage would probably be “everything is content”, and we can see how that’s been embraced across all the major social media platforms. A decade ago, mining your personal life for cash was de rigueur thanks to sites aimed at women like xoJane and Jezebel. While the First Person Industrial Complex bubble has burst, ‘everything is copy’ lives on elsewhere. While oversharing wasn’t invented on Tumblr, it certainly became something of an artform on the platform — many people learned how to joke about their trauma in precisely the right way in order to go viral, and subsequently replicated that success on Twitter, Instagram, and now TikTok.
It’s often joked that people shouldn’t date or marry writers, because they will inevitably write about you once the relationship ends (people seem to say this about Taylor Swift more than almost any other person, as though having a Taylor Swift song written about you wouldn’t be an incredible honour). But I would argue that using your own relationship for inspiration, the way writers like Nora Ephron and Taylor Swift have, is wildly different to using the lives of relative strangers for content, and ethically murkier.
I started really thinking about this question earlier this year after reading the essay ‘Cat Person and Me’ by Alexis Nowicki, in which the author revealed the similarities between a past relationship of hers and the relationship described in the short story that took the internet by storm in late 2017, ‘Cat Person’.
Kristen Roupenian’s actions raise a number of ethical concerns for writers: how far does ‘everything is copy’ stretch, exactly? It’s largely accepted that writing about your own life, or the actions of others towards you, is fair game. But is writing a thinly-fictionalised version of events that didn’t involve you the same?
Roupenian, in response to an email Nowicki had sent her following their shared acquaintance’s death, wrote, “I was wrong not to go back and remove those biographical details, especially the name of the town. Not doing so was careless.” Are identifying details all that stands between writers and the right to tell other people’s stories for them?
The issue was raised, yet again, thanks to the ‘Who Is The Bad Art Friend?’ essay by Robert Kolker in the NYT Magazine. Unlike the ‘Cat Person’ incident, there isn’t a clear and single wronged party — rather, both Dawn Dorland, who donated her kidney and wrote about it obnoxiously, and Sonya Larson, who used Dorland’s obnoxious writing in the short story it inspired, come off looking overly invested in something that should have been left behind in 2015.
But without going in to their subsequent actions (contacting anyone who has ever worked with Larson, filing lawsuits when you’re both writers living on writers’ incomes, pitching the story to the New York Times yourself), the now-viral essay does afford us with yet another opportunity to examine the ethics around writers viewing everything as potential story fodder.
Like with Roupenian, Larson took identifying details or words — in this case, copied and pasted Dorland’s letter from Facebook into her story without making many modifications — and used them in her story. Larson frames this as an issue of artistic freedom, and friendship, and trust, writing in an email to Dorland, “For me, honoring another’s artistic freedom is a gesture of friendship and of trust.”
Could it not also be argued that trust and friendship might mean hesitating before using a letter someone wrote about donating a kidney in a short story? Clearly Dorland felt as though her trust had been violated, and upset that this letter she shared in a closed Facebook group would be seen so widely because of someone else’s actions. Are writers entitled to insist that people trust them without offering much in the way of reciprocation?
Because, truly, what do the people whose lives are used for content gain from this? They get to see their own lives reflected back at them, but distorted by someone else’s own baggage. The writers themselves get paid (often not much at all) and sometimes, they get more — acknowledgement, adulation, virality.
As someone who has engaged in many kinds of writing, I understand the feeling that grips you when you see, or hear, or read something that you think would make a fantastic story (although usually the most I will do is turn it into a tweet). As a person who has grown up online and endured the experience of having people you don’t know twist your life, your words, and your actions, into a narrative that suits their own purposes, I can still only imagine what it feels like to have someone use parts of your life in their published work with little regard for the impact it may have on you.
It feels like the written equivalent of photographing a complete stranger in public— perfectly legal, but ethically dubious, particularly once intent and result are factored in. Are you photographing a fat person just to laugh at them? Are you copying someone’s kidney donation letter word-for-word just to frame them as an antagonist? Are you telling someone else’s story just so you can twist it and draw a conclusion that aligns with your pre-existing views?
Ultimately, I think that part of the issue is that writers can be incredibly insular people. While writing communities do exist, and things like fellowships, residencies and workshops do try to encourage the development of deeper relationships between writers, the nature of writing under capitalism means that people often see each other as competitors, not comrades. In order to make ends meet, you’re forced to mine absolutely everything for content, and only able to think about the ethics and the consequences once the cheque has cleared. But even before factoring in capitalism, I think a lot of people are drawn to writing because it is a largely solitary endeavour.
I’m inclined to conclude by arguing that fostering stronger feelings of community amongst writers would head off some of these ethical concerns before they’re even an issue — if you feel a responsibility to treat your peers with respect and kindness, you’re less likely to use elements of their life in your work. But I have no evidence for that; indeed, Larson was part of a writing community, and Dorland also considered herself a member of that same community (their differing opinions on this score are one of the things that made the Bad Art Friend essay feel particularly like a scene out of Mean Girls, in my opinion). All I have is a gut feeling that it is possible to create art without harming others or using their experiences to further our own careers, and a hope that others feel the same.
