‘Is it a betrayal?’ Claire Messud on writing her family

For her new novel, the author drew from her parents’ letters and grandfather’s memoir. She describes the fears and joys that come with writing about family

Countless young writers have asked the unanswerable question: how to write about family members without wreaking havoc? How to approach the urgent and inescapable material that has shaped your life without rendering that life unlivable – because you have included too many details about Aunt Joan or (almost always) portrayed one or more of your parents in an unflattering light … Given that fiction is always on some level born of experience (even when set in another century or on another planet), and that experience so often involves family, how to write fiction at all?

For years – decades, even – I skirted the question. I wrote fictions in which nobody I knew could find themselves, and when they did, it was pure projection. After I published The Emperor’s Children in 2006, three women asked why I’d written about their husbands, referring to one of the characters, a prominent journalist named Murray Thwaite, who was also a philanderer. They seemed reluctant to accept my assurance that I hadn’t. Convinced by small details – Murray’s preferred whiskey; his attitude towards teaching; his refusal to let the family’s housekeeper clean his study – they eagerly, if unhappily, claimed him. It turns out you don’t need to write about people for them to think that you have.