The Right to the Story - on Fiction as the Moral Choice
The Hollywood Reporter this week: Mary Kay Letourneau’s Ex-Husband Vili Fualaau Reacts to ‘May December’: “I’m Offended”. Late last year, Netflix released a critically-acclaimed fictionalized account of the famous scandal. In case you’ve forgotten, Fualaau was a middle-school boy when he was raped by Letourneau, his 36 year-old teacher. She went to prison, gave birth to his child, and — once Fualaau was a legal adult — married him.
May-December, starring Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, and Charles Melton all in award-baiting performances, is a very good film. (I saw it last week.) It is also a film made entirely without the participation of those on whom the story is based. Letourneau died of cancer in 2020, but Fualaau is still very much alive, barely 40. He tells the Hollywood Reporter, “I’m offended by the entire project and the lack of respect given to me — who lived through a real story and is still living it.”
(For more on the ethics of how we adapt “true crime” for the screen, I refer you to Amanda Knox, the onetime American college student wrongly accused of murdering her roommate in Italy. Amanda is a writer, a podcaster, and an exoneree — and she is fiercely critical of the way that Hollywood casually adapts the stories of the living without their consent or input.)
As a ghostwriter who helps people tell their stories, I’m keenly aware that while my first obligation is to my client, my duties extend beyond. I wrote last year:
It’s my job to think about what this book will mean for my client’s loved ones as well as the reviewers. The stakeholders include their own future selves, selves who may see things differently in a decade or three. The stakeholders include children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren still unborn; fame often doesn’t endure, but curiosity about one’s ancestors does. Most descendants will want to read great-grandma’s autobiography. Whatever they find within it will at least partly decide how they understand their heritage.
One common conversation I have with clients is about whether and when to share the manuscript with those whose stories are contained within it. It is impossible to hand “final cut” authority to every friend and family member and ex-lover who might make an appearance in a memoir. That’s a guarantee that you’ll end up producing the anodyne and unreadable. At the same time, it’s important to at the least, give the living a “heads-up” that this story is coming. Fualaau wasn’t asking the filmmakers to give him editorial control of the screenplay. He wasn’t asking to be a paid consultant. He was asking to be acknowledged. I tell my clients that whenever possible, giving fair warning to those who appear in the story is advisable on both legal and ethical grounds.
Someday, somehow, I will write something of my own. I have five ex-wives. I have children. I have the students I slept with. They are important to the story because if I had not been married that many times, I wouldn’t be me. If I hadn’t slept with my students, I’d be a professor, not a ghostwriter. And if I didn’t have children, I would have ended my life a decade ago. These are stories I have to tell if I am to tell the story at all. Yet the idea of sending a manuscript to the ex-wives, to my various student lovers, and then winning the permission of my children seems…. daunting. I sense that most of these constituencies would prefer the truth remain unwritten. My desire to be a good father and a decent ex-husband trumps the longing to tell a true story. Memoir is how I make my living. It is also a choice, not a need.
The answer, of course, is fiction. It would have been easy for the writers of May-December to create a compelling story with far fewer parallels to the Fualaau-Letourneau tale. If you wish to borrow someone’s life for your art, you ask their consent; if you do not wish to ask, you make your art sufficiently different that the inspiration is less obvious. That seems a basic rule worth following.
I have an idea for a novel. Samantha is a journalist in her early thirties, living with her husband and two small children in Orange County, California. When we begin the novel, Samantha’s father, Ted, has just died. He was 82.
Ted was a legendary high school English teacher, coach, and yearbook adviser for nearly four decades. Samantha’s mother, Meg, was one of Ted’s students. They married when Meg was 20 and Ted 48. Samantha was born when her mother was not quite 22 and her father 50. Meg and Ted had a second child, a boy — and then they divorced. Ted stayed involved in his children’s lives. The divorce was always amicable.
From the time they were little, Ted and Meg told their children the same story: Meg was a precocious student, and close to her English teacher, but nothing untoward happened while she was underage. It is only when she comes home after her freshman year at UCLA that Meg visits Ted in his office and the proverbial sparks fly. The age gap proved too challenging to sustain, Ted and Meg both admit, but they insist that the romance began only once Meg was an adult. There is no reason to believe otherwise.
That is the story Samantha grows up knowing. She often wishes her father had been younger — Ted is, of course, mistaken for her grandfather — but she is close to him. He is a devoted dad, coming to the plays and sporting events, providing financial and emotional support. Ted wanted to be a writer, but though he is a masterful teacher, his own prose does not shimmer. Samantha’s does, and her father lives long enough to rejoice in his daughter’s success.
It is only a few months after her father’s funeral that Samantha learns the truth. Her mother sits her down and tells her that Ted seduced her when she was only 15. “Seduced” is Meg’s word, and when Samantha, fumbling in shock, says a better word would be “raped,” Meg refuses to accept that term. What follows is the heart of the book — the struggle of a daughter to come to terms with her father’s darkness, the story of a mother’s decision to keep a secret, and the battle to define what makes someone a victim. Eventually, Samantha decides to write a book, and tracks down other former students of her father — including two whom he also abused. The drafts of Samantha’s book are interpolated into the novel — as is the sudden arrival of the #MeToo movement, which emerges just as the book is nearing completion. The crux of the novel revolves around the ways in which Meg and Samantha seek to help the other understand what happened, and how each comes to terms with the reality that the other will never see the truth quite as they do.
There’s a lot here about the ethics of memoir, and the way in which stakeholders, living and dead, get incorporated into one’s editorial decisions.
I may not write this novel, and you may not want to read it if I do. I did not teach high school English. I never slept with a student under 18. I am still alive. I am not Ted. Heloise is not Samantha. The idea is to use fiction to tease out issues of shame, consent, secrecy, and complexity — all themes that are very, very much part of my history.
I can wrestle — in words — with what I feel compelled to wrestle with without retelling my own story. I would have advised the makers of May-December to consider doing the same. There are complex moral dimensions of adapting true crime for the screen, and there are moral dimensions to memoir, and it is always, always wise (maybe even necessary) to consider them.