I Have So Many Good Stories That Are Secrets
On Charles Portis and being a public defender who is also theoretically a writer
What if “writing what you know” would be unethical?
I’ve been reading some Charles Portis again, specifically the Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany collection that was first published in 2012. It’s a collection of odds and ends from Portis’s non-novel writing career: a play, short stories, magazine articles, selections from his newspaper work covering the Civil Rights Movement, etc. Portis, the author of five dynamite novels (including, most famously, True Grit) is always fantastic, and though his novels are certainly more important than any of the miscellany I have read so far, I’m constantly delighted by whatever I encounter when I read one of these short pieces.
Some of the work (as well as, arguably, many of his novels) could be described as “travel literature.” “An Auto Odyssey Through Darkest Baja” describes him and a buddy driving down to Baja California in a “rat-colored 1952 Studebaker pickup” that spends the entire trip developing exciting idiosyncrasies and breaking down; “Motel Life, Lower Reaches” is a description of a number of motels he stayed at across decades of travel. They are uniformly wonderful little pieces, filled with wry observations, short philosophical statements and, most importantly, oddballs, who appear to have been attracted to Portis as by some inexorable gravitational pull.
It’s the details that make these stories work so well; Portis not only had the good fortune to meet some of the oddest people in the world, he had the keen instincts to know which three details would best showcase their peculiarities. Consider Mr. Purifoy, whom Portis meets in one of his motels, and who does many weird things, the funniest of which is when he “had taken the trouble to write down a good recipe for ‘thickening gravy’— milk gravy. He gave it to one of the girls at McDonald’s but suspected that she and her bosses had never even so much as tried it.” Granted, this was an older age of McDonald’s (I’m not quite clear on when this motel visit happened but I’d say the ‘70s based on nothing more than vibes), but still: can you imagine handing a McDonald’s worker a suggestion for their menu? Also: gravy!
Reading these makes me want to write this kind of travel literature, or at least literature like it; deadpan “creative nonfiction” that describes a peculiar person or place and resists jumping to broad, sweeping conclusions or thematic ruminations on the nature of human existence, but which is nevertheless suffused with the unique humor of the author. I have an endless supply of such stories. I could think of at least two dozen oddballs I could write 3000 words about right now, and although I might or might not have the chops to do these oddballs justice, there is a rich vein of material there for even a halfway-competent writer. The problem is that most of these people are clients in my practice as a public defender, and it would almost certainly be unethical to write about them in this mode; it would be impossible to really do them “justice.”
It would be one thing to write about the various injustices my clients face in a fashion that draws from their specific stories. That is not exactly free from ethical pitfalls, but it is at least in the service of justice; sometimes I do think that if everybody could just really understand what life is like for a PD client, we could move the needle on some much-needed criminal justice reforms and turn half the country into proper socialists. But that’s not the kind of writing I’m talking about right now. I’m talking now about the sort of carefully observed and deeply hilarious portraits of the human condition that Portis and his ilk constantly paint, and I feel like that sort of thing is out-of-bounds for a lawyer to write about their clients.
My clients, when I meet them, are people who have already lost. They have generally lost the lotteries of birth that would have afforded them easier access to better lives; they have often lost the roulettes that get them caught by police officers for doing the same sort of thing that huge swaths of the country do without fear of cages; they have always lost the battle to avoid criminal consequences. Sometimes, with a lot of elbow grease and/or a great deal of luck, I am able to win a trial or get a case dismissed, which is not so much a “win” for the client as it is a return to a state of neutrality; a state of not-being-actively-prosecuted by the government that still returns them to a net-negative from where they started. Often, I am not able to do that, because the evidence is what it is, and theoretically at least a prosecutor is not supposed to bring a case unless they are fairly certain they can win it, whereas I take whatever cases come down the pike, winnable or otherwise. Sometimes all I can try to do is make my client lose less terribly. Sometimes all I can do is help my client feel that someone was trying while they nevertheless lose everything. Sometimes I fail even at that.
These people rely on me to be in their corner; to stand between them and the various indignities of prosecution and police investigation and the cruel apathy of the criminal justice system, whatever it is they have been accused of doing (and whatever it is they may have actually done). They have placed themselves in my hands, and I have a sacred duty to do everything I can to get them out of trouble, regardless. As I say to new attorneys, the PD may be the only person in the world who has ever been on a client’s side, so we have a duty to stay there no matter how bad the evidence is or how much the client makes our lives difficult in the meantime.
Given this sacred (or fiduciary, to use the proper buzzword) duty, it would be in poor taste at best to write a Portisian description of any of my clients, who did not sign up to be laughed or wondered at by strangers on the Internet or in the pages of a magazine.
Of course, few ordinary people ever sign up to be a character in a humorous essay. But a PD’s duty to a client is not the same as an ordinary person’s duty to a stranger they meet on the street, or even the duty a writer has to their goofy uncle. If I write about the time I got in a barfight and talk about the various participants therein, I can satirize them without compromising that fiduciary duty I have to my clients, because I do not have such a duty to those folks. Instead, I just owe all the ordinary duties I owe to everyone else, which are still staggering if you think about them for too long, but are less than what I owe to people who have deliberately placed themselves in my hands and who I have promised to help.
Somebody somewhere once said that all writing1 is betrayal; that any time you write anything that either describes or is inspired by a real person you are doing them a disservice whether you meant to or not (and whether they perceive it that way or not, or even whether they ever learn about it at all). But although one may spend a lot of time worrying about the ethics of writing about an ex-boyfriend or the goofball you met at King Soopers the other day, it’s clearly much worse to do this to someone who you are supposed to be helping.
Which is a problem for me as a writer, because my clients frequently say and do very odd things, the sorts of things that would make good fodder for creative nonfiction or standup comedy. Not all, but many, of my clients are goobers, or at least goober-adjacent. A significant portion of my clients have very serious mental illnesses, for instance, which in no wise lessens their worth or dignity, which requires care and training to deal with, which should not be trivialized or demonized, and which also causes them to say and do things that are, by any reasonably measure, very funny.
Sure, I could anonymize these stories, though that still feels like a betrayal even if no one could reasonably ever reverse-engineer the stories to find out who they are about. “Mr. Smith said [x]” is hard to directly trace, but if Mr. Smith ever reads it, he’ll know he’s who the story is about, and he probably wouldn’t appreciate it but certainly didn’t consent to it. Or I could generalize the stories, but comedy is all about specificity. I can say “I once defended a client who was charged with disorderly conduct for shouting about his genitals in public,” and that’s true enough, but it’s not particularly funny, whereas the actual specifics of what he was accused of saying are, please trust me, hilarious. Or I could change the details; use my imagination and whatever writing talents I may have to make up new details that rhyme with but are not identical to the actual stories. But just as Portis’s real gift for his creative nonfiction is picking out the funniest actual things that real people said and did, the best parts of these stories are the details, the un-make-up-able things that people do that would beggar belief in nonfiction, and so it will never be as good as the real thing. I do not want to write the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter of creative nonfiction.
I swap these stories with other PDs; I tell them to Julia; I even tell them sometimes to other friends, but I can’t bring myself to use them in public-facing writing that I might theoretically get paid for. These folks deserve better than to be turned into material for a tight five that twelve people read, but they also deserve better than to be turned into a joke that thousands of people read, were I ever to write such a thing.
So I am sitting on a veritable goldmine of jokes and witty satire, and must avoid directly deploying my writerly pick on any of it. Woe is me, I suppose. I should probably consider getting a different job, if I want to gain material for public-facing writing, but I don’t actually want to do anything else. Unless they want to hire me to write Star Trek. I would quit this job to write Star Trek.
Somebody said this in something I read recently, though I’ve heard the idea before, but I can’t for the life of me figure out who or where.