Word had gotten around that tomorrow, I would give my uncle Dave’s eulogy, as I had done for his sister, Cindy, only eight weeks before. I was newly 19, an age that fits no one well. But at least I knew the codes of a Catholic wake, knew my place in the loose mourner’s phalanx: I was to receive sympathies, yes, but more importantly, I kept an eye on my cousins, my aunt, my mother, my grandparents, ready to throw myself in the line of any unwanted attention. They watched me for the same reason. Because on top of the condolences, I received a great volume of unsolicited input about what to include in my remarks at St. Martin’s Church the next morning. Third cousins twice removed, my uncle’s old friends, total strangers left me with adjectives, anecdotes, images. I had a sense, sweating in my one black suit, of a new and distinct social role coming into focus. These people needed to share with me—not their stories, exactly, but their fragments of Dave. I was to preserve them and then, they seemed to hope, recite them the next day. Eulogy as exquisite corpse.
Four long fingers landed on my arm. It was Mary, my uncle Dave’s first wife, two decades estranged, a peripheral and vaguely disquieting figure in the extended family.
“You’re giving the eulogy tomorrow,” she said, a statement. “Your uncle would have liked that.”
We had never met; she and Dave divorced before I was born, and as far as I knew, they hadn’t spoken since splitting assets. But people say things like this. Funerals, I had learned, grant mourners an extraordinary license to make claims on behalf of the dead. A license epitomized in the eulogy. I looked around for relief, but the room had gone hazy, indistinct—a fog of flesh, parking lot cigarettes, the way-way-back of the closet.
“People never know what to put in a eulogy,” Mary went on. “But I’ll give you something—you have to talk about the fried baloney.”
Whatever look crossed my face was not sufficiently discouraging.
“When he put bread in the toaster to make fried baloney, he’d lay the baloney right across the top. So it would cook that way. And when the bread popped up, he slipped the baloney in between and ate it just like that. And the toaster was all covered in grease!” Mary’s eyes floated back to me. “You have to talk about the fried baloney.”
I could smell it, the bright rumpy pungence. I could see the sheen rise on the meat, almost as if the memory was mine. The falseness woke me.
I realized three things in quick succession, half-hearing Mary and looking past her toward the receiving line, where my mother might notice and come to save me. Like so many of the people filtering through the beige rooms that afternoon, we were strangers to each other, Mary and I, strangers who imagined our mutual strangeness met and dissolved in a memory of David that we shared. But this was wrong. We each remembered our own David.
In the next instant I knew that I would not say anything about baloney. This led to the third realization: No matter what else I said to the mourners in St. Martin’s Church, I would disappoint Mary, because I would not mention the greased toaster, the whole personality it suggested, this composite memory where her David, not mine, lived on.
Mary wanted what we all want: “To save something from the time where we will never be again,” as Annie Ernaux writes in her collective memoir The Years, a kind of choral eulogy for time itself. But I was the eulogist; I would choose what to save, which David to remember.
Authorial responsibility to a real subject—living or dead—is one of art’s unresolved and probably unresolvable ethical questions. It is more difficult in the latter case, because to author is to authorize—to create, yes, but more precisely, to create, and then vouch, for something from a position of authority. To author and authorize a new version of a dead subject, one that will enjoy a kind of immortality in the space of the text, may feel like inflicting a second death on the original. The problem is even more difficult when the subject is someone the author loved.
My first book began in a eulogy, or maybe in three. I was 18, turning 19, in the spring of 2012. That May, my aunt Cindy died. In June, my uncle David, her brother. In October, their father, my Papa Hank. Each time, in the parking lot, at the cemetery, or in the lunch buffet line at the banquet hall, family and strangers approached to tell me how proud Cindy or Dave or Hank would be, how I had “captured” them. And each time I heard this praise, I was more aware of what I had not captured, what I might have missed or distorted for some small elegance. As the summer ended, I carried a sense of immeasurable failure. I had—somehow—to try again. The impulse wasn’t to honor Dave and Cindy and my grandfather, exactly—I had already done that. I don’t think my aim was even to tell a sharper truth. I wanted the impossible: to speak to them, each one of them, again. I Am Here You Are Not I Love You, forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press in spring 2025, is my attempt to do that—an act that goes beyond the possibilities of a eulogy and, I think, an essay, but that owes something to both those traditions.
Blake Butler’s memoir Molly gave new grounding for a discussion of this kind of writing in venues ranging from Bookforum to Vanity Fair to the Daily Mail—and also on X. The book is named for Butler’s late wife, the poet, memoirist, and baker Molly Brodak, who died by suicide on March 8, 2020. It recounts their relationship and Butler’s discovery, days after her death, that Brodak had been systematically deceiving Butler and frequently cheating on him with other writers and even her undergraduate students. Eventually, moving almost crabwise toward the realization, Butler describes her behavior as abuse. But instead of condemning Brodak, Butler refocuses on the person he loved—that love expanding to accommodate a greater knowledge of her being and experience that she withheld from him in life.
“I still refuse to pull my heart and mind away from the Molly that I knew,” he writes. In waking life, we sense, he may be overcome by “deepest furies … all the tendrils of the tragedy”; but as a writer, he has the power to suspend knowledge, memory, and the testimony of his wounds, instead abiding a different version of Molly—“the silt of her,” he says—in the space of the finished text, where “nothing but love remains for long.”
Butler foregrounds the responsibilities of love and authorship throughout the text. “It feels strange to tell this story as if it’s mine,” he writes. “I’m still here, after all, and Molly isn’t, and in her absence she’s left a labyrinth, impossible to narrate without qualm.” “Should I be allowed to make this said?” he later asks, slipping into the passive voice and neatly skipping over the present tense. The act of saying—as if he is capable of authorizing the text, but it will fall to some third voice to author the Molly that will live in it. Butler’s authorial “I” can reemerge only after enumerating—at length—his qualms about narrating in the first place.
In these passages, Butler anticipates much of the criticism that he eventually received—namely, that writers who speak for lost loved ones may replicate power imbalances that existed in life. The critic Jamie Hood draws a comparison to Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes—but, she argues, excessive discussion of “authority” risks misrepresenting the text, and by extension obscuring its subject, Molly Brodak. It doesn’t matter whether Butler has the “right” to tell Brodak’s story, because he isn’t—he’s telling his story, and the sensitive detritus that Brodak left behind, from sexts to her suicide note, are, inextricably, part of it.
To make an authorial leap into any Other is a high-stakes moral and aesthetic endeavor. To make the leap into a subject you love is heightened into an altogether different act, its violence arcing back.
The challenges of Molly are prefigured—if a bit jumbled up—in the plot of a very different kind of book, Biography of X by Catherine Lacey. Like a distant cousin to Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two Birds, Biography of X is a novel purporting to be a biography of an invented artist, X, by her grief-wracked widow, an erstwhile journalist named C. M. Lucca, all set in an alternative time line. The “biography” is complete with extensive image sourcing, footnotes, and endnotes—all invented, often appropriating the names of real people, from David Bowie and Susan Sontag to Renata Adler and Chris Kraus. It even includes a photo and biographical blurb for the “author.”
Like the Molly of Molly, the artist X emerges progressively as secretive, deceptive, even cruel—but also brave, magnetic, evoking the best in others, certain of her moral and aesthetic convictions. And like the Butler that narrates Molly, C. M. Lucca assembles her narrative through investigation and reflection, uncovering things that her subject—her late wife—clearly meant to keep hidden. The pain of these discoveries shapes the landscape of the text like magma, causing the narrative to break off abruptly, avoid, digress, circle back.
The resemblance doesn’t end at the four corners of each text: we can also recognize Lucca the biographer in the vehement reaction against Molly, coming especially from some of those who were close or felt they were close with Brodak. While some detractors focused on specific choices in Butler’s text, I believe that at root was the feeling of nonrecognition: here, these readers feel, in the vivid finality of the published text, is an insidious falsehood, a substitute for the person they knew. In Lacey’s book, Lucca resists writing about X, even refuses for years to go into her late wife’s office, until she reads an unauthorized biography by a man named Theodore Smith. She did not recognize the X in his text. “Now that Mr. Smith’s false narrative was out there and I was in our cabin alone, I had nothing to do but avenge him and his lies, to avenge reality itself, to avenge everything,” she reflects.
Perhaps all writing is vengeance of one kind or another. Lucca wrote to avenge reality like Ernaux wrote to avenge her people. Something like a small, small vengeance might have crossed my mind when I heard Mary insist on the baloney. Something like vengeance might have crossed hers when, the next day, I left it out.
Nonfiction writers from Herodotus onward have made enormous claims of authority over their materials, their subjects, even their readers—so much that some of the protest over Butler’s choices has seemed almost antique. In the wake of New Journalism, late 20th- and early 21st-century writers like Janet Malcolm and John D’Agata tried to articulate what had changed, and lay out the new rules of the game.
In her preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), Joan Didion famously quipped that “writers are always selling somebody out.” In The Journalist and the Murderer, Malcolm goes much farther. The nonfiction writer, she says, “is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.” The nature of the “betrayal,” she argues, is that the writer “never had the slightest intention of collaborating” with the subject, “but always intended to write a story of his own.”
Serialized in the New Yorker in 1989 and published as a book the following year, The Journalist and the Murderer examines the case of Jeffrey MacDonald, a US Army doctor convicted of murdering his wife and two children, and the writer Joe McGinniss, whom MacDonald hired to write a book about his presumed innocence. When McGinniss’s Fatal Vision came out in 1983, the journalist revealed that he had become convinced of MacDonald’s guilt early in the trial (but had kept this hidden from his subject and patron); he even concluded with a “diagnosis” of psychopathy. Stung and enraged, MacDonald sued McGinniss for fraud and breach of contract, setting in motion a trial that would expose the elements of fiction required in all nonfiction, the structural power imbalances between author and subject, and—Malcolm concludes—the moral transgression at the very heart of the journalistic act. Malcolm’s book dramatizes what it analyzes, with Malcolm and her journalistic “I” cast in the position of the all-powerful “confidence man” as she interviews McGinniss, lawyers, and various other characters from the underlying controversy.
I say underlying controversy because Malcolm’s essays, and later her book, scandalized newsrooms and gave succor to public figures who felt themselves the victims of some reporter’s slant, spin, or cynicism. Her choice of title misled readers and critics as to her real subject—not, as Fred Friendly pointed out in the New York Times, “journalists in the news business,” but rather “such authors as Mr. McGinniss and, ironically, Ms. Malcolm herself, who write authorized or semiauthorized books about unsuspecting psychoanalysts, movie stars, murderers and former occupants of the White House.” In other words, Malcolm’s claims do not apply as easily to beat reporters as they do to writers laboring under the unsexy auspices of “creative nonfiction.”
This “non-journalistic literary genre” came under the microscope more than two decades later in The Lifespan of a Fact, in which the essayist John D’Agata and the former Believer fact-checker Jim Fingal recreate their encounters around D’Agata’s essay “What Happens There,” about the suicide of a teenager in Las Vegas, which the Believer published in 2010. The text of the essay appears in the center of each page, surrounded (and sometimes swallowed) by dialogue between D’Agata, Fingal, and occasionally a Believer editor, as the parties debate D’Agata’s accuracy and sourcing, the boundaries of the essay as a genre, the role of facts in nonfiction, trust between reader and writer, authority, and the ethics of writing about those who don’t have the power to write for themselves. More than a fact-checker, Fingal is an articulate advocate for verifiable truth: “You are writing what will probably become the de facto story of what happened to Levi [Presley],” he tells D’Agata, referring to the Las Vegas teenager who leaped to his death from a casino observation deck, the centerpiece of D’Agata’s essay—“a dead boy,” D’Agata later admits, not only someone unable to speak for himself in the present of the text, but someone who left behind no record to compete or compare with the essay.
In one of several instances of rhetorical jiu-jitsu, D’Agata claims that this act—a kind of appropriation and ventriloquism—is the nonfiction writer’s essential task. “We must as writers leap into the skin of a person or a community in an attempt to embody them,” he says. “That’s obviously an incredibly violent procedure, but I think that unless we’re willing to do that as writers (and go along for that ride as readers), we’re not actually doing our job.” In The Journalist and the Murderer, Malcolm only went so far as to label this appropriation of fact and agency as necessary: “Promethean theft … transgression in the service of creativity … stealing as the foundation of making.” D’Agata builds on this argument, claiming that what to Malcolm is “morally indefensible” is actually a kind of duty, even a moral responsibility. Notably, D’Agata offers the lead blurb on the back of Molly and appears among Butler’s “Acknowledgements.”
I agree with Malcolm and D’Agata, recognize their experience. As a matter of degree, I am less inclined than D’Agata to change facts in my own nonfiction, more inclined to present the reader the enchanted incongruity of things as they really are. But the interesting choices come at the end of our knowing. There we must make the “leap” D’Agata describes. And it is violent. I think of the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s elegant definition of consciousness: it is like something to be—a person, a cat, a jellyfish. By claiming authority over that subjective experience and transmitting it to a reader—which is necessary in all but the most brittle nonfiction—I am appropriating consciousness itself.
This is violent for any subject. It is ethically complicated for a subject like D’Agata’s Levi Presley. And it is a stranger act, at once tender and immense, to perform on a subject you knew, loved, and lost. This is the experience Butler documents and Lacey dramatizes in Molly and Biography of X.
To carry out life’s most basic functions, the human operating system assumes a distinction in all that our senses perceive. Some percepts, like the movement of the breath, the touch of sun, the flavor of anger, we recognize as “Self.” All else is “Other.” Love, though, draws a second distinction. From the soup of all percepts, love isolates a special Other, a category that may be in flux though we act as though it is fixed. Love charges it with significance that all else lacks, making it realer than science, experience, memory—realer than what we call our own lives, realer than death. So real that we forget that love is like any ordinary experience: a handful of crushed glass scooped from all that is perceivable or conceivable, pieces already tumbling from the fingers back into the undistinguished mix. Lacey knows this—it is why Biography of X includes its exhaustive notes and sources. The biography Lucca attempts to construct, the X she attempts to bring back, to avenge, may appear for a moment more vivid than life itself—but that vividness is perpetually collapsing back into the meaningless catalog of the real.
To make an authorial leap into any Other is a high-stakes moral and aesthetic endeavor. To make the leap into a subject you love is heightened into an altogether different act, its violence arcing back. Whether you are writing about a dead parent, a lost dog, or a living lover, the consciousness that writes is not the consciousness that lives and experiences this relationship. To bring the reader into this experience requires the appropriation or reanimation not only of the loved one, but also of the observed self’s relationship with the subject. This kind of attempt enters a wholly separate genre, something that not only floats between memoir, where the narrative prism is the authorial self, and biography, where the narrative prism is the reconstructed subject—but also between essay, a form with its roots in reason, and eulogy, a form with its roots in sacred ritual.
I have designated a shelf near my desk for what I consider to be the canonical works of this nameless genre. I begin with Geoffrey Wolff’s The Duke of Deception (1979), then his younger brother Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life (1989). Then Maggie Nelson’s Jane (2005); Patti Smith’s Just Kids (2010); Molly Brodak’s Bandit (2016); T Kira Madden’s Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls (2019). Although they do not center “loved ones,” exactly, I also count Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers and Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat. The most recent entry in the genre is Butler’s Molly, a text entwined with Brodak’s own Bandit. In each of these texts, biography acts as a Trojan horse for memoir, or memoir acts as a Trojan horse for biography, requiring the author to take on the unique perspectives and responsibilities of each tradition simultaneously. All present both the author and a secondary figure as twin subjects, like two black holes in orbit. Together they comprise an extraordinary accounting of the limits of love and knowability. The mutual unknowability between the author and that second subject is the unique tension—the wound—that makes these works sing. It is also what makes these books uniquely dangerous—dangerous, that is, to the author, who is compelled by love and loss to write them, but proceeds against the unshakeable fear of being wrong. The stakes are higher in this genre than in journalism: here, “wrong” is not a matter of accuracy but of how well the writer really knew the one they loved. And love without knowledge is merely affection. Love itself is on the line.
Inevitably, “a person always exceeds and resists the limits of a story about them,” C. M. Lucca writes in Biography of X. “No matter how widely we set the boundaries, their subjectivity spills over, drips at the edges, then rushes out completely.” The difference between D’Agata’s “essay” and this intergenre of uniquely self-sprung but other-oriented memoir is that the author shapes a story that is both not theirs and very much theirs—inextricably, undeniably. Love makes it so. The author must confront this contradiction, and most authors acknowledge that there is a boundary between the theirs and the not-theirs. All writers come upon such boundaries sometimes. The authors who are not practitioners of this particular craft would like to set up orange traffic cones, cordon the area, illuminate it with the kind of high-powered sodium lamps that highway work crews use … if they could. But most can’t find the boundary, not with any confidence. Some leave it alone. Others—like Brodak, Wolff and Wolff, Nelson, Madden, Shapland, Ní Ghríofa, Butler—do their best, the work itself transgressing and begging forgiveness.
Malcolm’s claim about collaboration is 180 degrees false where love and death are involved. I have exactly one aim: To speak with the dead. Even to collaborate. As two consciousnesses, both knowable to one another and not. That is all I really ever wanted when those I loved have died, and when, on several occasions, members of my living family have asked me to suborn this private desire to a public act, the eulogy. And in this duality—private grief and public mourning—I have found a way through (if not quite out of) the quandaries of craft and ethics that afflict all writers who share these interests, and which are documented in so many of their books.
“To be clear: presenting this information in the context of it having any question of validity makes me feel ill,” Butler interrupts the narrative of Molly to assert. The paucity of our material only sharpens our sense of distance and loss: “One of the hardest parts of thinking or writing about Molly in her absence is that it’s impossible to gain any further information from the source, much less to inquire into what had once been marked as true,” he later reflects. What Bulter wants is what Malcolm’s journalist only feigns: to collaborate with Brodak on a story that is not his, not hers, but theirs.
Catherine Lacey captures this well in Biography of X, naming the feeling in a note from X, one that also describes the narrator’s feelings of hopelessness as she undertakes her memoir-biography:
I’m sick of thought. I want something palpable and beautiful … But nothing a human can do is palpable. The history of art is women consoling each other in the face of this fact … The idea of getting somewhere with love is even more frustrating and futile than the idea of getting somewhere with art.
Getting somewhere, then, can’t be the point. As Lacey’s narrator C. M. Lucca says early in the book, “This is not a biography, but rather a wrong turn taken and followed.” The lived experience of dialogue that writers seek is never in the text itself but somewhere down that wrong turn. It remains in the scaffolding, messes, ineffable silences. In writing—an essay or a eulogy—the lost are alive to us for as long as we wrestle with what to put in. We take a catchphrase, a favorite shirt, and leave out the fried baloney. In handling these incongruous details—which never themselves add up to a life—the departed are, for a moment, as mysterious to us as they once were.
As strangers and relatives told me some 12 years ago, I was able to “bring back” Cindy and David and my grandfather—for them, if not for myself. I had a more private experience, one that never made it to the page. I returned to it when I realized the work of the eulogy was unfinished, and I began writing. Once again, the departed split: one to live forever for readers, and one to come alive—briefly—for me. 