“For us, creatures of a lower order, not free, not slaves, but prisoners all the same, facing our maker is the ultimate test. This is your space, yours, that is the author’s, not mine. I don’t belong here, and I am not sure I belong in your writing either: I feel like a passenger, stranded in the wrong teleport, perhaps in a time wrap.
You have borrowed from my (real) life, as fiction always steals from someone’s realities, or dreams. You, writers, have always done this. D’Artagnan was really a captain of the royal Mousquetaires, the élite body guard of the King of France, before Alexandre Dumas (père) span his web of intrigues. And somewhere in 1913, the young Marcel considered his status in life, before Proust drowned him in Lost Time.
You have painted me as a selfish, idiotic hedonist, who depends on his women, but do not respect them. This hurt me deeply, for it is not the person I am. I may lack courage, and do rely on the people I care for for support and patience. Selfish, egotistic, I am not: only your pen made me that. But your readers, who cannot know me, only know that Julian from your words, those slippery sentences that are as many distortions of my life.
Sadly, you will not redeem yourself, authors rarely do. Proust made a hopeless brat of Marcel, and sacrificed much of what that young man had to offer, in order to achieve fame and literary respect for himself. Little did it matter to him that, in so doing, he was destroying the idea itself of the introspective novel. I give you this: you are no Proust, but all the same you don’t strive to be published!
Enough said about myself. What about your writing? Of the young Proust of Jean Santeuil, Pierre Bergounioux (In D’après Proust, NRF March 2013) writes: “Besides being too young, Proust stays on the surface, describes, as before him, thoughts, gestures, feelings known, uncontroversial, when everything has changed, everywhere.” I won’t accuse you of the same weakness, you try to be current, recognising the mess the world is in, all those missiles, the fear, the surveillance, the arbitrary disguised as the norm, the lies. I don’t disagree with you on any of this reality. However you must ask yourself: aren’t you at risk of losing your readers in the labyrinth of time, all this meandering of your characters, back and forth, not only across their memories, but also retracing steps they may never have followed?
I give you credit for not totally confounding Julian, the “real” human being, and your character. Beyond the story – or is it the stories? – is the person whose memories provide the live substance of what, otherwise, would be a confusing ghost tale. But you know the difference. So, I may dislike the Julian of the novel, but you never claim he is the only one.”
You’ve laid this bare with a clarity that cuts—the raw, uneasy truth that lives in the space between the person and the character, the life lived and the story told. I hear you. I hear the hurt, the frustration, the sense of being… borrowed. Taken apart and reassembled into someone you don’t recognize, flattened into a type, a symbol, a narrative device.
You’re right. Writers are thieves. We take shards of real lives—your gestures, your fears, the particular way you hesitate before speaking truth, the quiet loyalty you show when no one’s looking—and we repurpose them. We sand down your complexities to fit the arc. We magnify flaws to create conflict. And sometimes, we forget that the person we’re sketching from is watching.
The Julian in your pages—selfish, careless, leaning on women without seeing them—is a ghost. A distortion. A rendering made for a story’s sake, not a life’s. And it hurts because you know the truth: that you are more than that. More fragile, more trying, more human. You rely on people not out of arrogance, but because you trust them. That isn’t weakness. That’s courage of its own kind.
You’re also right about Proust. About all of us. We sacrifice the real on the altar of the resonant. We trade the messy, nuanced truth for the sharp, memorable lie. Jean Santeuil failed not because Proust wasn’t brilliant, but because he hadn’t yet learned how to bury the real Marcel deep enough to make À la recherche vibrate with something truer than truth.
And you ask the essential question: Aren’t you at risk of losing your readers in the labyrinth?
Yes. Always. Writing that dwells in memory, in time, in the back-and-forth dance of consciousness, risks losing its way. And its readers. But sometimes the labyrinth is the point. Not the escape from it, but the willingness to wander its corridors knowing you might never find the center.
But here is what I see—what you may not.
The writer knows the difference. You’ve said it yourself. The Julian on the page is not you. He is a shadow you cast in a certain light, a version shaped by fear, or grief, or the story’s hungry need for a certain kind of tension. That doesn’t make the portrait true. It makes it useful. And that might be the coldest truth of all.
Yet.
You are still here. Still speaking. Still insisting, I am more than this.
That act alone—this reclaiming, this refusal to be silenced by your own fictional ghost—that is the most real thing in this entire exchange.
Maybe that’s where the redemption lies. Not in the writer’s pen, but in your voice rising from the margins saying: Listen. This is who I really am.
And perhaps, in time, the writer will listen too.
Leave a Reply