Iris Jamahl Dunkle and Kelly McMasters on Biographical Ethics

Following Elon Musk’s estranged daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson’s accusations of unethical behavior on the part of Musk’s authorized biographer, memoirist Kelly McMasters and biographer Iris Jamahl Dunkle join co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to talk about the ethics of biography. Dunkle, the author of Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb, talks about using archives to restore the history of Babb, the writer whose notes John Steinbeck used to research The Grapes of Wrath, and how women’s lives are often wrongly or incompletely depicted. McMasters, a memoirist whose recent book The Leaving Season: A Memoir portrays many people close to her, talks about the impossibility of writing honestly about her life without including her children, the two people with whom she spends the most time. Dunkle and McMasters discuss Wilson’s accusations against Walter Isaacson, whom she says did not directly contact her for comment for his recent book about her father, although much of his book refers to her life. The group also discusses recent revelations that Alice Munro failed to act when she learned that her second husband had abused her daughter, and how authorized biographies often omit full accounts of the truth. Dunkle and McMasters read from their work.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: We all have been, and many other people as well have been, reading about Vivian Jenna Wilson, Elon Musk’s estranged daughter. She does not want to be associated with him, like a lot of people… like me, for instance, but he’s not the only person she’s mad at. She recently posted – this is the literary angle of this – she posted a series of messages about Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, who she says behaved unethically in writing about her. She says Isaacson deadnamed her and said that when he tried to reach her, he deliberately failed because “you knew the angle you were going for, and that my testimony would have fucked up your pretty little portrayal of an irredeemable human being.” What should Isaacson, who is Elon Musk’s authorized biographer, have done? Called her at the end of reporting the book? The beginning? What are the ethics here? Iris, let’s start with you.

Iris Jamahl Dunkle: Well, there’s a lot of ethics in something like this because you have the voice of a woman being suppressed, but you also have the idolization of a male figure. 

This is very similar to what happened with Jack London. I wrote a biography about Jack London’s wife, and he was put on this pedestal by all the biographers, and no one actually looked at his wife. They weren’t able to talk to her because she was dead. That’s the difference about writing about dead subjects, but they didn’t go back into her voice, into her diaries, into her letters, and so they didn’t find out that she was actually a huge part of the publication machine that was Jack London. She actually helped write his books and led them on the adventures that they went on throughout their lives. 

And so it’s a typical way that biography in the past has been done. That idea of, this is the story that I’m going to, you know, continually retell. And it doesn’t matter what the evidence says, I’m going to stick to this story. It’s completely wrong, in my opinion, because it sticks to a single narrative, and it really silences the people whose stories we need to hear, who help us understand how that single narrative is actually incorrect in most cases. 

WT: I agree with all of that, but I was also trying to explain this to my son last night at dinner, who I’m dropping off at college. We were talking about this issue, and he’s like, “Well, why would Isaacson have done that?” And I said, “Well, if he doesn’t have access to Musk, he doesn’t have a biography.” He is incentivized by the fact that he needs to do a biography of a famous guy who’s giving him access, and if he pisses Musk off in the way that he portrays him, then Musk is going to shut that access down. And Isaacson doesn’t make a whole crapload of money on this book. Am I wrong about this?

IJD: No, you’re absolutely right. I mean, that’s the Catch-22 of writing a biography that is about someone who’s alive, who’s controlling their story. I think it really makes it almost impossible to tell an unbiased story because you have that influence, unless you are relying on other people within that life. And, in most cases, especially a controversial figure, like Musk, he’s got so much money he can control the story, no matter what.

WT: Kelly, you were nodding your head. Did you have something you wanted to add? 

Kelly McMasters: I just find it interesting, the division between a reader’s interpretation of what biography is, or should be, and the writer’s side. I think the same can go for a memoir. But in terms of biography, I am not a biographer, mostly because of all of these sticky issues. I love research, I love the archives, but it’s a different type of obligation to your reader. And I think that’s the difference, right? A writer has to decide who their obligation is to primarily: to the reader or to their subject.

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V.V. Ganeshananthan: I want to switch a little bit. Kelly, you mentioned before that there are reasons you don’t do biography. You’re a memoirist, and I was so interested in your argument. I was reading your LitHub essay about the ethics of writing about family, and you were really persuasive on the point of writing about the importance and necessity of including, you know, in your case, your children in your work, and how do family ties complicate writing about other people? Like, what if, for example, Musk were writing about Vivian Jenna Wilson? I mean, the horror of that idea is…

KM: Wow. That hadn’t even occurred to me. I don’t think he could sustain…

WT: Isn’t it more likely that Vivian Jenna Wilson will write a memoir? I mean, that was the pattern with Salinger, who I was mentioning earlier – his daughter did write a book about him.

VVG: Yeah, I mean, like watching this whole thing, I mean, she’s a very interesting writer. She was posting on Threads because she doesn’t use X for obvious reasons, and she’s got quite a voice.

WT: She’s going to get a gigantic advance, and she will write a book.  I certainly hope so.

VVG: I was trying to pose the most horrifying version of the question, but yes, let’s go with this saner one. What if Vivian Jenna Wilson were writing a memoir?

KM: Well, my hope would be that it would be about Vivian and not about Musk, right? I think that’s the power of memoir, that you can create your own and control your own narrative, your own viewpoint, your own story. And I think there’s a tension.

I love what Iris has been saying about digging into the archives. Responsibility, right? The idea that there is so much out there that you have to find, right? So it’s: What can I include? But the tension is also against: What do I keep out? And I think both biography and memoir have that same question.

I was at a literary fest this weekend, and somebody came up to me and looked at my book and said, “Oh, a memoir. You look too young to write a memoir.” And I said, “Actually, this is my second one.” And she just thought that was hilarious, right? I think there’s a concept and a misunderstanding of what the point of memoir is. It’s very different than biography. It is not cradle to grave, and not even biography is cradle to grave, right?

So the idea that what we choose to leave out is as difficult a choice as what we choose to include, but if you’re going to include something, you need to, for my purposes… What I believe is you need to include it fully, and then that becomes your responsibility. So I made the choice to keep my children on the pages. So then I had to wrestle with how to responsibly do that. These are the two people I care about most on the planet. They are also the two people I spend the most time with. So a memoir about me would be completely disingenuous if they were absent.

So much of my book is about becoming a mother, right? I biologically became a mother, but I didn’t really in my heart become the mother that I believe I am today, what the word means to me, until much later. And that was a big part of the book. What needed to happen. I needed to leave my… I needed to break right, leave my family. I needed to do the leaving before I could become and inhabit that position of mother.

Now, they were very little for that period, so that puts even more responsibility on me, I think, in terms of craft. So not just ethics, but craft, right? I think these are two different questions. Sometimes I would write a draft, and it wouldn’t feel right. Something was wrong, and I would realize, oh, I’m inhabiting their viewpoint, and I don’t want to do that. I’m using my narrator as a vehicle, and all the observations, so I can observe them, but I never will know what they were actually thinking, what they were actually doing in their hearts and their minds. I wanted that truth, that honesty. I hope also that maybe one of them will write their own memoir. This is my story. This is not their story. And I think that’s what I mean by if Vivian does write a memoir, and I also hope she does, my hope would be that it would be her story, not her story in relation just to who Musk is compared to her. 

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Keillan Doyle. Photograph of Iris Jamahl Dunkle by Theresa Sawyer. Photograph of Kelly McMasters by Sylvie Rosokoff.

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Iris Jamahl Dunkle 

Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb • West: Fire: Archive • Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer • Finding Lost Voices | Substack

Kelly McMasters

The Leaving Season: A Memoir • Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir From an Atomic Town • This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home •“The Ethics of Writing Hard Things in Family Memoir,” Literary Hub

Others:

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson • “Musk’s Daughter Flames Dad’s Biographer: ‘You Threw Me to the Wolves’” by Dan Ladden-Hall | Daily Beast • J.D. Salinger • The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck • “What do we Know about Alice Munro Now?” by Contance Grady | Vox • La Belle Noiseuse • The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot’s Hidden Muse by Lyndall Gordon • Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation by Emily Van Duyne • Jackson Pollock • “What Virginia Woolf’s ‘Dreadnought Hoax’ Tells Us About Ourselves” by Danell Jones | January 25, 2024 | Literary Hub • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 6 Episode 19: “The Lives of the Wives: Carmela Ciuraru on Marriage, Writing, and Equity”