pulpit frances wilson to balance a beach ball on its nose. ‘I shook my head,’ she recorded, ‘as if to shake off my lingering doubts.’

Whose Life Is It Anyway?

Imagine the scene. Go on, project yourself into that marquee at the Brisbane Writers Festival this September when Lionel Shriver stood up at the pulpit to give the keynote speech, entitled ‘Fiction and Identity Politics’. She had been asked to speak on the subject of ‘community and belonging’, but, as she put it, expecting a ‘renowned iconoclast’ such as herself to tackle anything so mushy was like asking a ‘great white shark to balance a beach ball on its nose’.

I’ve been imagining the scene ever since the story broke; in fact I can’t get it out of my head. The coverage, after all, has been particularly vivid: The Guardian printed the full transcript of Shriver’s talk, which can be read against the account (also published in The Guardian) by Yassmin Abdel-Magied of being in the audience. Abdel-Magied is, according to her website, ‘a young, Aussie Muslim woman asking questions and doin’ her thang’. She was apparently also Queensland Young Australian of the Year 2015 and, aged twenty-four, she published a memoir called Yassmin’s Story.

So there Lionel Shriver was, sporting a jolly sombrero, shooting off about the right of novelists to imagine scenes, to project themselves into other places, just as I’m doing now. The sombrero was a reference to an incident at Bowdoin College in Maine earlier this year, when some students held a tequila-themed party at which sombreros were worn. The party guests were subsequently investigated by the college for ‘ethnic stereotyping’ and placed on ‘social probation’, while the students’ general assembly denounced the event as an act of ‘cultural appropriation’.

Where, asked Shriver, does this leave the novelist, whose job it is to ‘try on other people’s hats’? What is a novel if not an appropriation of someone else’s voice, an attempt to get inside a person who is different from us? Appropriating identities is something that Shriver is particularly good at; remember how, in We Need to Talk About Kevin, she got into the head of the mother of a boy who went on a high-school killing spree with a crossbow? Shriver cited the case of the white British male Chris Cleave, who wrote a novel, The Other Hand, from the perspective of a fourteen-year-old Nigerian girl and was accused by an American reviewer of ‘identity theft’. The story of the (imaginary) girl, said the reviewer, was ‘not implicitly [Cleave’s] to tell’.

Yassmin gets up to leave.

‘As I stood up, my heart began to race. I could feel the eyes of the hundreds of audience members on my back: questioning, querying, judging.’ Having grabbed the spotlight, she prepares for her close-up. ‘I turned to face the crowd, lifted up my chin and walked down the main aisle, my pace deliberate.’ Whenever I’ve walked out of a theatre – something I imagine we’ve all done – I’ve apologised profusely for the annoyance caused to those who’ve had to move their coats and bags and knees on my behalf. I’ve said ‘excuse me’ and ‘sorry’ about a million times. Not so Yassmin: a model on the catwalk, her chin positioned to maximum effect, she clinches the moment with a strategic glance over her shoulder. ‘“Look back into the audience,” a friend had texted me moments earlier, “and let them see your face.”’ So Yassmin had been texting her friends as she listened to Shriver!

Wait. This is turning into Yassmin’s story and I need to talk about biography. Yassmin isn’t going to hijack my pulpit as well as Shriver’s. Where does the crime of imagining the lives of others leave us biographers? We also wear sombreros (or top hats or mob caps or wigs) for a living. Men write about women, women write about men, straight men write about gay women, rich people write about poor people. A life of Samuel Johnson’s black servant, Francis Barber, by a white biographer called Michael Bundock, was welcomed by reviewers last year, not one of whom noted that Barber’s story was not Bundock’s to tell. When James Campbell, who is white, wrote a life of his friend James Baldwin, who was black, the term ‘cultural appropriation’ never came up in the reviews. Why the heck not?

What, after all, is biography if not cultural appropriation? The absorption of another person’s nationality, sexual identity, rituals and beliefs is the biographer’s bread and butter. Their job is to see the world through someone else’s eyes. Why does no one turn to their neighbour in the middle of a talk by, for instance, Carole Angier on Primo Levi and say that they cannot legitimise the ‘unfettered exploitation of the experiences of others’? Biographies are necessarily transgressive and can be as fuelled by imagination as any novel. The difference is that we work within the constraints of the facts.

Is the novel’s freedom of expression being threatened, Shriver asked, by the suggestion that those of different ethnicities, nationalities and gender identities ‘own’ their particular experiences, which means that any attempt ‘to participate in their lives and traditions, either actively or imaginatively’, is regarded as ‘theft’?

But Yassmin Abdel-Magied, sitting on the front row, has had enough of Shriver turning the ‘unfettered exploitation of the experiences of others’ into a ‘celebration’, as she put it in her article for The Guardian. Turning to her mother she says, ‘I can’t sit here. I cannot legitimise this.’ Her mother’s eyes bore into Yassmin’s own, ‘urging me to remain calm, to follow social convention’. But asking Yassmin to sit quietly is like asking a great white shark

My aim in writing biography is to take the reader somewhere they would otherwise never go: to inhabit the mind of Bruce Ismay, who jumped from the Titanic, or Thomas De Quincey, who lived in thrall to Wordsworth and opium. Have I, in writing about a drug addict, told a story that is not mine to tell? Of course I have! These are De Quincey’s experiences and I’ve stolen them from him for my own devices. But no one questions the morality of biographers and there is only one reason for this: biography doesn’t matter. Novels can drive cultures forward and bring civilisations down, but biographies are stroked and petted as though they were old family retrievers. Next year at Brisbane let’s have a keynote speech on ‘Biography and Identity Politics’. And I’ll sit in the front row. r november 2016 | Literary Review 1