The Perils and Pleasures of Literary Portraiture:
Writing About Real People

by Barrie Jean Borich

A View from the Loft, January 1998

As a writer of creative nonfiction, I understand my work to be a representation of the observed and experienced world as it is filtered through one individual sensibility. In other words, my job as a writer is to describe what I witness, what I remember and what I understand. The use of the word "I" is important here. I am telling no one's version of the facts but my own. This is perilous territory when it comes to writing portraits of real people.

In the book I am currently writing, which is an exploration of life lived in a long-term intimate relationship, there is only one thing I am not allowed to write about my lover, Linnea. It's not the most intimate thing I could tell you about her. It's not the most embarrassing, and not even the most shocking. But even if I were to write my version of the most difficult, or most irritating, or most comical stories of our lives together—the sort of stories anyone might accumulate after years of "married" life—I couldn't think of anything that would make Linnea look really bad. In addition to telling you that I am extremely lucky in love, this should tell you how insignificant the forbidden topic is.

To me. Not to her. Linnea has grown accustomed to being a constant subject of my literary work. Outside of this one unmentionable, she lets me write and publish whatever I want, as long as I'm willing to negotiate around a few of the finer details. I'm not just lucky in love, I'm lucky to be in love with someone so willing to be written about.

Writers are by nature greedy little gatherers of the world. I could frame this discussion by offering you a list of instructions on how to avoid using people in the process of making your art, and I could probably do it in a way that made both me and my artistic quests sound pretty noble. But it would be a lie. Any artist whose work reflects the human condition, the human story, the human journey, must use stuff of the real world as material. Perhaps Joan Didion overstates when she says, "The writer is nobody's friend," but not by much. Without the materials of real life, real people, the writer of human stories has no material. She or he is a painter without colors, a musician without sound.

The real question is how we use people in our work, and for what purpose? Is there a discernible line between honorable representation and manipulative self-interest? The answer is different for everyone who asks. As I think about these questions in my own work, I begin with a couple of lists. First, what are the pleasures of using the people I love, or any real person, as a subject? Why do I do it? The list I come up with is a mix of the personal and the formal.

I write about people to know them better, and to work with familiar and loved material, so the work itself is a source of joy. I write about people as a way to come to terms with relationships, or the influence relationships have had on me. I write about people who I am, and have been, intimate with in order to elevate in literature that which is domestic and dear. I do it to preserve an aspect of or moment with a real person, and I do it to know myself better by knowing what I love. I do it to illuminate that which has not been seen, or because the portrayal is interesting. I do it because people like to read about it. All this is deeply pleasurable work. If I'm lucky, my subjects will enjoy showing up in my writing; they may even be flattered. This is certainly a pleasure, but not the reason I do it. Why I write what I write, in the way that I write it, and why I love my work are, finally, determined by what I believe, which is that the individual life is the basis of who we collectively are. The portrait helps us to see ourselves better.

The list of things I worry about is just as long. I worry that my subjects will get mad at me, will be embarrassed, will feel, and in fact may be, objectified. I worry I will hurt them or otherwise cause them harm. I worry I will use them solely for my own gain. And I worry that others will read the portrait differently than I do. I worry that the act of creating the portrait will be a source of pain for me. I might get the portrait wrong, but even if I do a decent job, it's impossible to do it completely; a rendering of the thing is not the thing. The subject may not comprehend the craft of rendering, may not understand that a portrait can never be more than a version or aspect of the real person. This worry is no small thing. It has, literally, kept me awake some nights.

To enter a realm so fraught with conflicts, the writer must be convinced that the thing created is worth all this trouble. I am convinced of this. Much of my certainty is intuitive. I sense that this is important work. I love to see and read this kind of work. I value it, so I hope that at least some other people feel the same. I can come up with slightly more rational reasons as well. I write to create a beautiful thing, yes, but I also write to think, to know. It's a form of inquiry, the pursuit of what makes me curious. What are real people really like? It feeds a hunger for the world. It's also a form of love. I'm not talking about romantic love here, at least not entirely. I mean a scrappy, skeptical, inquiring love, a critical relationship with the actual that is more concrete, more documentary than abstract expressions of sentiment. When I am at my best, as a writer and as a person, I love the world for better and for worse. Both must be part of the portrait or I am not telling the truth. This may not matter to every writer, but it matters to me. I crave honesty in art. I want my art to tell the truth in as many ways as it possibly can.

Truth, honesty, un-glossed human emotion about what really happened, may not have always been one of the anchors of literary expression, but here and now, in the psychologized, self-conscious, late twentieth century, it's what more than a few readers want. Much of the so-called memoir craze has to do with talk-television "freak" shows, and not all of what is published under the heading of memoir is good literature, but there is a mood out there. Some people have gone so far as to say that fiction is not delivering the news, but memoir is. Although this may be another overstatement, the book sales, the new book contracts, the sheer numbers of contemporary memoirs and books about contemporary memoirs suggest that more than a few readers crave some version of the actual world in their literature.

Does this mean I should tell you this thing Linnea doesn't want you to know? Should I hide behind the excuse that complete honesty is what the people want? I'd like to. I could tell the story well, maybe even get a laugh. But I won't, because to do so would betray the contract I have made with my most intimate subject. Real-world prose has to take risks if it's going to be compelling, and if it's going to have any hope of competing with television and the movies, but with risk comes consequence. I am not willing to take the consequences in this case.

Yet there have been moments in my writing when I have taken enormous personal risk in my portraits of other people. I told some of my mother's story in my first book, and it's a story she has barely told herself. She didn't tell me not to, but neither did she give me permission. I can't say for certain that I did the right thing. Although I classify my work as creative nonfiction, I change names of my family members because, I hope, it gives them enough fictional distance to feel more comfortable. I hope, but I don't know. What I do know is that they don't tell people about my book. Is this because I say I'm a lesbian and a recovering alcoholic? Is this because I describe in great sensory detail why I'm haunted by the memory of my grandfather? Or is it because they feel embarrassed, exposed, injured? My guess is all of these things are true, at least partially. Perhaps someday I'II know more about how they feel, but I don't yet. I made an intuitive choice to use a story that I felt I needed to write and publish if I was ever going to write and publish anything else. I made a choice to take whatever consequences presented themselves to me.

Did I use them in this process? Of course. I used them to write a story that many people have told me moved them. I used them to break a family silence that I felt—personally, artistically—needed to be broken. I used them to tell a story that I had to tell or risk not surviving my own bad dreams. And I used them for personal gain: to write a book, to further my career, to be a writer. People take all sorts of things from their families, from the people they love, for complex reasons having to do with survival, with all sorts of outcomes. I took, and used, my version of some parts of my family's life. I have already told you that I am greedy when it comes to my use of the real stuff of the world in my art. I believe you make a choice to take what you need from the world if you decide to make a career of writing, although some writers make it more clearly than others, depending on their discipline, their genre, their sensibility. But you have to decide that the work is as important as countless other things. I decided it was as important as my relationship with my family. It was a big risk. Now that I'm older, I understand this on a deeper level than I did then, and there are times I am aghast at my own nerve.

But there's another side of it, and this again has to do with my contract with my subjects, stated or unstated. A real portrait shows more than one side. It includes strengths, weaknesses, complexity. A well-done portrait is a human portrait. Hardly any human is only a victim, only a perpetrator, only a hero. This applies, especially, to me as I appear in my work. I am flawed, capable of bad judgment, hardly innocent. The reader doesn't have to trust the "me" that speaks through my work. As a first-person narrator, I am by nature unreliable. More important than anything else I do to preserve the moral contract I set for myself in my writing is that, within the texture of the portrait, I try to give the reader clues to this unreliability. Because, finally, my portraits end up being more about some version of me than about the subject. Not what is, but what I see there. If writing what I see there is likely to get me into trouble, then I decide whether or not to do something to cover my ass. Maybe I will show the work to my subjects. Maybe I will talk to them about it. Maybe I'll just hope they never read it. But in terms of the work itself, I feel compelled to provide as complete a rendering of the actual as possible, which includes a textual nod to the impossibility of the task.

This, finally, is the greatest difficulty of all. The work itself. If I am to create what I consider good art, then it must be complex, multifaceted. It must contain texture, contradiction, new ways to look at what I find beautiful or not beautiful. It must at least strive to offer a fair rendering of my subjects.

To do this, I don't need Linnea's private and forbidden story. I just need a story, any story that can bring to the text what it needs. It's because I love her so deeply that I have such a full palette at my disposal. I can say the same for the rest of my family now, but only because an unexpected thing happened when I told their stories. I can say with some certainty today that I had no right to do that, but when I did, an intricate scaffolding collapsed. The very structures of estrangement that had kept me at a distance from my family—a big enough distance that I was able to even conceive of taking such a risk—fell away, and today I have a much closer relationship with them. This gave me an expanded palette to work from, and so I can render them better than I could before.

Why did this happen? It's hard for me to say for sure, but from what little they have said about it I think they were expecting accusations and complaints. What they got was a complex portrait of a daughter who was, for a while, just as they feared, in trouble. They don't understand why I would admit this to the world, but the fact that I don't spare myself seems to mitigate some of what (I assume) they don't like in the portraits I have drawn of them. This unreliable first person narrator does not claim innocence, admits to flaws, and so her view of the rest of her world becomes more reliable.

I can't promise that it will turn out this way for you. I can only say that there is no way to predict some consequences, and sometimes fear keeps us from the good stuff. We make moral choices every day—in our work, in our daily business, in our homes. Some of them are conscious, some are not. When it comes to our art, we have to trust our personal instincts as strongly as we trust our rational sense of right and wrong. This, finally, is how I approach writing about Linnea, about my family, and about everyone else I love and hate, easily or through the scrim of difficult memory. This kind of writing will turn out to be, I hope, more than kiss and tell. If it works as literature, it tells more than the story of one individual life, represents more than just Linnea, is perhaps not about Linnea at all, but a rendering of Linnea, a creation based on her real life, some sort of everyday myth. Like all myth, the portrait should aspire to be about more than just the surface of the story or the picture. It should be open and explore and search for what it means to be in the sloppy, beating presence of real life, and real love.

© 2000 Barrie Jean Borich