The Weight of Coauthorship

I imagine writing your own life story is like going to substandard therapy eight hours a day. Writing someone else's life story, in my experience, is more like being that untrained therapist.

I recently had the honor to co-author the memoir of AIDS activist Marvelyn S. Brown. At 19 years old, Marvelyn fell for her Prince Charming one day on a Nashville playground, chose to have unprotected sex with him, and was in the hospital a month later, diagnosed with HIV. She was shunned by most of her community, eventually forced to live out of her car. After a nearly fatal car accident, she realized that she could die any day, that all of us—HIV positive or not—could die any day. She decided to make her life matter.

I have known, since I first sat in the green glow of my family's gargantuan IBM PC in the mid '80s, that writing would be the way I would make my life matter. I just had no idea how complex my chosen method would turn out to be.

Writing someone's story is not like working in a soup kitchen. It's a good deed, but one that requires self-restraint, ethical questioning and, let's be honest, monetary compensation. When I learned that Marvelyn and I had secured a book deal and had four months to write her memoir, I was thrilled that I'd be able to pay my mortgage for another season, and then possessed by terror. It wasn't the deadline that scared me. Instead, I was apprehensive at the profound responsibility of having someone else's story in my hands. Though I had overwhelmingly good experiences telling others' stories in my first book, about our culture's obsession with physical appearances, there had been some postpublication fallout—mostly in the form of angry mothers who were aghast that their daughters had revealed so much. I was still somewhat keyboard shy to be responsible for another young woman's public disclosure.

What made the job even more harrowing was that I would be writing in the voice of a woman so unlike myself: black (I'm white); from a Southern, working class, single-parent household (I grew up in a two-parent, hippie home in Colorado Springs, Colo.); and street smart (I have an Ivy League degree, but have been known to leave my keys in my front door).

To soothe myself, I took writer Tom Zoellner out for coffee and begged him for advice. Tom co-authored the memoir of Paul Rusesabagina (of Hotel Rwanda fame) and knew about writing in a voice so different from one's own. He reassured me with a metaphor Paul had used to reassure him: “You have to think of yourself as the architect of a house. Marvelyn has hired you to create a design for the house, because you have the necessary expertise, but it is her house. It's her responsibility to articulate the kind of house she's dreaming of, but it is your duty to let her know when her suggestions aren't structurally viable.”

From then on, I became not so much writer as architect. When Marvelyn wanted to skip over critical scenes, I encouraged her to put them in—emphasizing that the integrity of the whole was at stake. One day, she told me she was, in a way, relieved that she had been infected with HIV rather than becoming pregnant, like most of her friends; she's been able to see the world and live an independent life. The writer in me got goose pimples with inspiration, but the architect knew adding cultural analysis to Marvelyn's story would be like building a breakfast nook the client had never ordered. When Marvelyn wanted to end her acknowledgements with “If I've forgotten you, get over it. I have HIV and one of the side effects is memory loss,” I considered urging her to rethink her blasé humor, but then remembered that her wit was one of her greatest weapons and kept my mouth shut (except to laugh).

I sat among a crowd of onlookers at her recent Barnes & Noble appearance, listening to her read from one of her favorite sections. And hearing her voice ring loudly, clearly and authentically, I've never been so proud of what I didn't do.