The Manifesto of What Can and Cannot be Said

I’m here with Lilith of the Blue System, midway through their ‘I Need to Make Sure Everyone is Okay with What I’m About to Say’ press tour.

Lilith, I understand the system has been working on an independent, long form project recently. A memoir, is it? Can you tell us about that?

Sure, well, as you know, I have dissociative identity disorder, which means that my relationship with my own history is fragmented and… difficult to hold all at once, if you get my meaning. I can’t necessarily know one thing at the same time as I know another. So, I left a therapy session one day sort of lamenting the habit I had as a child of burning diaries after I’d finished writing them. I lamented the fact that I had no physical record of the life that had created me, created my illness.

I realised that if I wanted a record, I’d have to write one. And like most creative projects happen for me, the solution came to me in a moment of immaculate clarity. I knew that I needed to write the whole thing exactly as I remembered it, and I knew that the only way to do that was with surrealist automatism.

Surrealist automatism? Tell us about that.

it’s spoken about in Andre Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto (1924). You write without abandon; you don’t impose structure that doesn’t emerge completely organically. You don’t read back or read over; you don’t edit. You just say things exactly as they occur to you.

And I think this methodology wouldn’t have worked for me a few years ago, because it would have sort of… mutated into incoherent, childish trauma retelling. I think I needed the skill and training I have, that’s been hard won, to be able to pull it off. I hope I’m pulling it off, anyway…

It was important to settle on a thematic grounding, I think. I needed to find the throughline.

And what throughline emerged as you wrote the text?

Honestly, I think I had an inkling of what it would be before I started. Of all the stories of harm I needed to tell, men had far and away done the most. So, I decided to unite them into one man with many faces. The story is called Dear Boy because it speaks in the second person, always directly to the unified man (or men) that I have had sexual connection with (violent or not) throughout my life.

The story sounds as if it could be a bit of an ordeal.

Yes, it is. It was an ordeal to write it.

You have a history of writing content that is explicit and forgive my bluntness, often disturbing, do you think this novel breaks even a little from that tradition given that it’s talking directly about your own trauma?

No, unfortunately not.

You don’t think you’ll shy away even a little bit? Even to save your own sanity?

No, I think for the sake of my sanity I needed to tell it as clearly as I remembered it. Which definitely fucked with me as it came up. It helped me to sort of remember schemas that I held in my body as truths. Patterns of self-hatred and fear.

What about the responsibility to other readers, then? Is there, do you think, a right that the reader inherently has not to be traumatised, or re-traumatised, by your work?

The reader has the right not to be a reader, I guess. My mum, for example, is a great supporter of my career, but won’t read my work anymore because she finds it too upsetting, and this is fine.

I think I’ve spent my whole life holding these stories, holding the severity of them, and worrying whenever I chose to disclose them that I’d upset someone. As if I needed to hold back the tide of insanity that is inherent in that kind of trauma. Protect people from it.

But then, people will go out and buy books like A Little Life by Hanya Yannagihara, or Jessica by Bryce Courtney, or really anything written by Jodi Picoult. And what? Is my story a violation of someone’s right to comfort because it’s true? Art purifies the abject, Kristeva says. If my own abject can be purified by writing it, then someone else’s might be purified by reading it.

I think it’s a feminist principle, right? Truth telling. Being able to be completely honest in a way that feels horrific. Ugly. I enjoy doing that.

You talk about a feminist theory of telling here, but I just want to circle back to something you’d said earlier… that you were addressing the book to the men you’ve had sexual or romantic contact with, violent or otherwise. Isn’t that the exact opposite of basic feminist principles? Do you feel there’s a problem with the fact that your whole novel centres men?

Perhaps. I don’t think the novel honours the women in my life who have done me the most good. As characters, they are flattened and uninteresting in the telling because the focus is on the boys. And because, with a story so vastly populated, I actually couldn’t do them justice without destroying the integrity of the text.

But the reality is that gender violence shouldn’t be pastoralised simply for the sake of decentring men. I’m sure there was a version of my life that I could have written, maybe a kind of anti-Dear Boy that only told women’s stories and left significant gaps where all the horror was. I probably could have done that. But it wouldn’t have been an accurate representation of what I think.

I fucked too many men and have been harmed by too many men to pretend myself capable of de-centring them. It would be a total performance.

I see, so the point is that the novel has a sort of social agenda. Can you discuss that?

A social agenda? Like I’m trying to achieve something towards a liberal cause? A societal good? Make progress?

Fuck, well that’s a lot to put on a memoir, isn’t it? I feel like… It should be the responsibility of the justice system and the community to respond to violent crime, right? It shouldn’t be on the victim to rebalance a harm like that. If I’ve been raped, isn’t it insane the idea that I should then have to try my own case and dole out my own punishment to the perpetrator?

It might be the responsibility of the reader to make progress out of the artefact. If I just tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, then someone else with less skin in the game can figure out what to do with it.

Do you not think, as an academic, that you have a responsibility to write with purpose? Or do you not care if what you write does damage?

I think my responsibility as an academic is to write well, to write ethically, and to write with rigour.

But, I’m not a psychologist or a social researcher. I’ve not collected quantitative or qualitative data in the production of this text. My ethics and my idea of good writing are my own.

The question of damage… I can’t answer. Yes, I care. I care more to repair than retaliate. If there’s damage caused, I will be happy to be accountable to it. I’m sick of being frightened of saying the wrong thing.

There are many instances of body shaming in the book, particularly directed at men. You discuss penis sizes and poor sexual performance explicitly. Are you concerned about accusations of misandry?

Not in the slightest. Anyone actually reading the book will, I think, see that I come off far worse than any man with a dick on the small side.

I’m considering taking it out, to be honest. Because I do feel that the body shaming is, as it were, low hanging fruit. And not super ethical. So, we might not see it in the published text unless it’s directly connected to events. But in the writing of it, that’s what my brain says, so that’s what came out.

There is, too, a little bit of a retributive feeling. Like, men have been writing about women’s bodies with as little sensitivity forever… Is it not just a rebalancing act if I’m honest about someone having a dick a little below average?

But, don’t you think there’s a problematic double standard where if a man were to write with the same explicitness about women’s bodies, it wouldn’t be acceptable?

If men wrote honestly about women’s bodies, I think that might be okay. Like, men write about women’s bodies like… ‘Her pussy was swollen and juicy, like a peach. Hairless and covered in warm fuzz. He pumped his dick into her downy folds once, twice, three times, and felt her walls clamp over his shaft as her body rocked with her orgasm.’

Yeah, that fucks me off. But what? If I read a male writer describing the way that period blood caked in his pubic hair, and flaked off him like thin plaster once dried, or how his partner smelt vinegary and ripe and salty, or how she might have a pimple on her left butt cheek, or stretch marks, or discharge, or… fucking… hair. I would be fine with that. I’d love to read that.

Just because men have historically done it so badly doesn’t mean I think they should be banned from trying to do it well. If any of my past lovers would like to write about me with equal starkness, I invite them to give it a go. It’s super fun.

I want to talk about de-identification. You’ve had to change names and identifying characteristics to avoid a very real threat of libel and defamation should the book be published. Does this concern you?

Fuck yeah. But… maybe it’s my Autism and rigidity, I honestly don’t know how I could write this thing without it being so populated. I want to protect people’s privacy and their right to tell their own stories. At the same time, I want to exercise my right to tell mine. I think there’s a really uncomfortable and unspoken social standard in our world that requires you not to talk about others. I’ve never understood why. I think it should be celebrated and encouraged. People are so afraid of gossip, but it’s healthy.

I don’t want to say anything that is infringing on the rights of the people I’ve encountered to their privacy, so I don’t think I’ll be getting sued for someone being identifiable in my book around my having shared that they have an ugly penis, for example. But there were spaces I kept the de-identification to a minimum, and that’s where actual crimes were committed, and I believe that I could prove, on the balance of probabilities, that they happened. It’s the truth defence. If those people came after me, I’d welcome it.

Yes, I wanted to touch on that. You make several accusations in this text that have never been reported to police or taken to court. This means that those accused have not been subject to due process before their stories are made public. Do you think this is fair?

Hah, that’s easy. They wouldn’t face due process even if I did report them. I did once. Cops said it was my word against his so… They threw the thing out.

Okay, so how can the reader trust that these accusations are not false or exaggerated for dramatic effect?

That’s the million-dollar question. I’m a writer, so it’s my job to lie and manipulate. I’m also a magical realist though, which is essentially an attempt to create a certain kind of truth.

I’ve spent a lifetime not being believed. Might as well not be believed in print, right?

What would be the point if the story isn’t believed?

Made me feel good doing it.

Do you feel like this process has been therapeutic for you? All this truth telling?

Of course, as I said, I have created a working record.

Well, why not let it be simply a record of your own life for your own purposes? Something that stays between you and your therapist? Why does the world need to read it?

This is… my job. You’ve asked a few questions here that suggest I might be unaware or uncomfortable with the consequences of writing in this way, but the reality is that this is what I like. This is what I want to make a career out of. I want to produce work that creates consequences, that risks something.

If I weren’t bearing my own bones and organs, what could I possibly be risking?

I wonder whether you think that doing this only proves your family right? Haven't they been saying for many years that you just want to create drama? That you're unpleasant and manipulative? And what about the small army of ex-boyfriends you've left in your wake having to deal with your constant bleating, endless accusations that no one really ever believes? Don't you think the world is sick to death of your writing before you've even started? Don't you think you'd be better off if you just got a real job? Or maybe wouldn't you be better off dead? It's clear that you think you're pretty talented, but have you ever considered that any self-esteem you might have is completely misplaced? That everyone else knows that you're stupid and ugly and crazy, even if you can't see it?

I think you need to calm down. What a performance.