by
Helen Garner
I offered to go right back and expunge all—or all unfavourable—mentions of him. He looked sceptical. I said it would be a distortion, but that I’d do it if it was necessary. I also offered not to mention him any more, except procedurally. I said it was the first time I’d had to make a decision between being a writer and being married. He laughed and said I was overstating it. I said I didn’t think I was. This morning we spoke further about it. He expressed his revulsion again, but said he felt ‘awkward’ about seeming to ‘demand self-censorship’ from me. He said I should write an account of this disagreement, and then continue to write as before. This to me is not quite right. But I don’t know what I ought to do instead.
It would be a ridiculous distortion not to write about him at all. There’s no way he’ll ever understand that writing about my life is the only thing that makes it possible for me to live it. I can’t (or won’t) give it up. And I won’t burn the notebooks or leave instructions for them to be burnt when I die: this last is where he’s putting the pressure on. Actually I feel real sympathy for him. It must be awful to know his life is being reported through my eyes. It would be awful to be married to me.
thinking about why i feel differently about this vs the caveh zahedi (eg) approach to things ... it's definitely gendered, but the gender aspect is only a proxy for some bigger moral battle ... i think the typically feminine approach is to use art as a way to wrestle with the moral stakes of a situation, to find clarity that can be used to guide one's actions. whereas the male approach is almost the opposite, to abdicate one's responsibility to find the moral center by instead dramatizing it. (thinking also of Rejection and why i hate it so much)
maybe i'm overreaching by trying to overlay it on a gendered axis but i don't think it's the worst framework for thinking through the matter tbh
another way of putting it (the more generalized conclusion) is that there is a difference between using your art as a place to figure things out, to draw conclusions that you can then apply in your life (with the side effect of there being some record of it for posterity), and giving up entirely on achieving any sort of moral equilibrium because you think that dramatizing it is your primary responsibility. the dramatization should always be of your attempt to make things right