Insight: Writer Leah McLaren included her mother’s story of sexual abuse in her upcoming memoir. Her mother accused her of appropriation. Now McLaren is defending her choice.
she’d been robbed. As do any number of writers who’ve been involved in similar “scandals.”
The debate over stealing stories is a pernicious thought trap – this is what happens when we turn victim narratives into cultural currency: Even the most honest and brave victim stories can and will be weaponized as narratives of convenience. This is not good for anyone, least of all victims themselves. Or their children, by the way. It’s a difficult conversation but I think it’s worth talking about.
At 18, in my first semester studying English at McGill, I embarked on an affair with one of my mother’s former colleagues, a married magazine editor, for whom I’d babysat in high school. He’d been in town promoting his first novel and took me out for dinner, and then later, on a press junket to New York. I broke it off with him by not returning his calls . For a while he was distraught.
My book began as a collaboration with my mother; when that failed it evolved into something else – a book that was different, more urgent, an investigation into one mother-daughter relationship that probes the tender spot where filial love and stories intersect. It is heartbreaking to me that it has become a source of division, but once I started I pushed on. As my mother often told me growing up, “Writers write.” I took her at her word.
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