I consider myself an honest person. I might have reappropriated a few lonely books from hotel rooms, waiting spaces or houseboats but I always put them back into circulation after I’ve read them. Almost always.

Reading No Malleable Stuff, an essay published in Overland by Jeanine Leane, caused me to question my assumptions about honesty and freedom in writing. I am working on a story about a South Australian woman who lived in the 1800s. Reading this essay caused me to ask: is my response to her empathic or is it theft? The Florence Nightingale Effect is a term used to describe a caregiver who develops stronger feelings for a person they look after. I am not looking after a dead woman. I am not offering care, tenderness or any other thing. There is no reciprocity, no relationship or link between she and me. She is the keeper of the story and I the deliverer. And in the small dark spaces where the truth has run out, I imagine. The story is held together by the threads of that imagination. In some places I have used the wrong needle, in others, the stitching is crude and the truth comes apart. But sometimes the truth and my invocation of the truth blend together on the page to make something new.

If writing is liberating, writing biofiction holds you to account. A voice in the night calls out: stop thief. As you turn out your pockets you find what you have taken: someone else’s voice.  If you will be a thief, I say, be an audacious thief. Transmute the story into what moves you. In The Danish Girl, author David Ebershoff uses gender reassignment as a theme to talk about identity, love and creativity. The Master by Colm Tóibín is a work of biofiction centered on the life of Henry James. Yet, it does not limit itself to James. The novel deals with interiority and expansivity both, as well as failure, avoidance and regret. Biofiction is not about giving biographical truths, but rather it is a literary form for symbolically representing themes from history. The task for a biofiction writer is to take themes of oppression, enslavement, sexuality or society, then write them into a story with resonance for modern readers.  

A thief is a thief whether she steals an apple or a diamond.  So let it be the diamond.

Lara Saunders 2021