Making, taking, and faking lives: the ethics of collaborative life writing

Whose book is this?

- Malcolm X

Although issues of literary ethics may arise in any genre, ethical dilemmas seem to be built into collaborative life writing in ways peculiar to it.(1) With fiction, ethical criticism is usually concerned with issues of meaning and of reception: in the simplest terms, does the text have beneficial or harmful effects on its audience? But nonfiction generally and life writing specifically raise other concerns. Indeed, although Wayne Booth limits his scope to fiction in The Company We Keep, he asks key questions that are perhaps even more compelling for life writing than for fiction: e.g., "What Are the Author's Responsibilities to Those Whose Lives Are Used as 'Material'" (130), "What Are the Author's Responsibilities to Others Whose Labor Is Exploited to Make the Work of Art Possible?" (131), and "What Are Responsibilities of the Author to Truth?" (132). With collaborative life writing, especially, ethical concerns begin with the production of the narrative and extend to the relation of the text to the historical record of which it forms a part.

Ethical issues may be particularly acute in collaborative autobiography because it occupies an awkward niche between more established, more prestigious forms of life writing. On one side is solo autobiography, in which the writer, the narrator, and the subject (or protagonist) of the narrative are all the same person; at least, they share the same name.(2) On the other side is biography, in which the writer and narrator are one person, while the subject is someone else.(3) In the middle, combining features of the adjacent forms-and thus challenging the common-sense distinction between them - is as-told-to autobiography, in which the writer is one person, but the narrator and subject are someone else.(4) The ethical difficulties of collaborative autobiography are rooted in its nearly oxymoronic status; the single narrative voice - a simulation by one person of the voice of another - is always in danger of breaking, exposing conflicts of interest that are not present in solo autobiography. Although the process by which the text is produced is dialogical, the product is monological; the two voices are permitted to engage in dialogue only in supplementary texts - forewords and afterwords - and even there, the dialogue is managed and presented by one party, the nominal author. Insofar as the process is admitted into the narrative, then, it is exclusively in supplementary texts, and generally as a chapter of the writer's life. Though critics are not in a position to mandate disclosure of the process, fuller disclosure is likely to reflect a more ethical collaboration; such disclosure is certainly rhetorically effective, insofar as it suggests that the nominal author has nothing to hide.

Autobiographical collaborations are rather like marriages and other domestic partnerships(5): partners enter into a relationship of some duration, they "make life" together, and they produce an offspring that will derive traits from each of them. Each partner has a strong interest in the fate of that offspring, which will reflect on each in a different way. Much of this is true of any collaborative authorship, of course; with autobiography, however, the fact that the joint product is a life story raises the stakes - at least. for the subject. It is easy enough to articulate ethical principles that should govern the production of collaborative autobiography. The fundamental one might be a variant of the Golden Rule: do unto your partner as you would have your partner do unto you. Thus, autobiographical collaborations should be egalitarian; neither partner should abuse or exploit the other. Given the subject's stake in the textual product, a corollary principle would be that the subject should always have the right to audit and edit the manuscript before publication. As we shall see, however, in some circumstances, this is easier said than done.

The vast majority of collaborative life stories result from partnerships that are voluntary, amicable, and mutually beneficial. Still, there is a thin and not always clear line between making, taking, and faking the life of another person in print. Co-authoring another's life can be a creative or a destructive act, a service or a disservice, an act of homage or of appropriation. The potential for abuse lies partly in something the term itself tends to elide: the process, though cooperative, is usually not in the literal sense a matter of collaborative writing (which has its own problems). Rather, some of the difficulty comes from the disparity between the contributions of the two partners. Obviously, there are different kinds and degrees of collaboration, but, in most cases, one member supplies the "life" while the other provides the "writing." The extent to which this is an oversimplification of the process depends on a number of things. I do not mean to endorse a model under which "writing" is taken too literally; as contemporary rhetorical theory insists, in some sense the entire process of composition, from initiation and invention to copyediting, is "writing." Nor do I mean to imply that the "writer" is entirely dependent on the subject for the "story"; most writers are drawn to their subjects by previous knowledge of them, and most supplement interviews with independent research. Nor do I mean to identify "form" exclusively with "writing" and "content" with "life" or to imply that the "writing" does not affect the content; any mediation carries its own message(s). Indeed, as we shall see, mediation can be a source of ethical problems, especially in cases of cross-cultural collaboration; for example, when the implications of the form are unavailable to the subject, there is the danger of misrepresentation that will go undetected by him or her. Ultimately, however, no matter how involved the subject is at each stage of the project, the partners bring different skills and contributions to the final project; their labor is of different kinds, and most of the wording of the final text is attributable to the "writer." In the final analysis, then, the partners' contributions are not only different, but incommensurate, entities - on the one hand, lived experience mediated by memory; on the other, the labor of eliciting, recording, inscribing, and organizing this material.

The inherent imbalance between the partners' contributions may be complicated by a political imbalance between them; often, collaborations involve partners whose relation is hierarchized by some difference - in race, culture, gender, class, age, or (in the case of narratives of illness or disability) somatic condition. Having power or rank over someone is not the same as overpowering that person, of course; the latter is a pitfall that may be evaded. In the scenario typical of ethnographic autobiography, however, the subject may indeed be subject to the writer's domination, in part because the subject is likely to be one of "those who do not write" - in Philippe Lejeune's phrase. This has historically been the case with American racial minorities - African Americans in the case of slave narrative and Native Americans in the case of what Arnold Krupat calls Indian autobiography (30), and much recent criticism has been devoted to recuperating the point of view of subjects who are people of color. My own recent work on narratives of illness and disability suggests that, like other marginalized groups, people who are ill or disabled may therefore also be at a disadvantage with respect to their collaborators. The political imbalance latent in narratives of illness and disability is perhaps most obvious and most problematic in those cases in which the completion and publication of the narrative devolve upon a survivor who narrates another's terminal illness. For example, I have found that relational (particularly parental) narratives of gay men who die of AIDS are often unwittingly homophobic to some degree; because they are generally written and published posthumously, the subject has no opportunity to audit them.(6) But there are other circumstances in which disability or illness may compromise the ethics of the collaboration; for example, disabilities that make solo autobiography impossible may also make it difficult for the subject to review the manuscript and mandate changes.

Even where such review is possible, the process may involve unintentional misrepresentation. A case in point is that of I Raise My Eyes to Say Yes, by Ruth Sienkiewicz-Mercer and Steven B. Kaplan. Sienkiewicz-Mercer has been severely disabled from birth by cerebral palsy, so that she can neither speak nor write; unable to keep her at home, her family sent her to a state facility where she was misdiagnosed as mentally retarded and in effect "warehoused" - supervised rather than educated. Eventually, she was able to make her abilities known, and partly in response to the disability rights movement, she has been able to move out of the state facility. Her story which, as a story of liberation, is akin to a slave narrative - was written with the collaboration of a lawyer and advocate for people with disabilities through an extremely labor-intensive process. Sienkiewicz-Mercer would scan customized word-boards to select a category, and through a process of questions and answers she would sketch out a skeletal account of an incident; Kaplan would then flesh this out and read it back to her for any corrections.

I see no reason to doubt the accuracy of her narrative, which Sienkiewicz-Mercer had the opportunity to edit. And there is no question of exploitation: Kaplan serves deliberately and faithfully as her advocate. But there is a serious discrepancy between Sienkiewicz-Mercer's level of literacy - as Kaplan describes it, she reads "at best, at a first-grade level, recognizing only simple words placed before her in a familiar context" (vii) - and the voice of the narrative, which is that of a college graduate and fluent writer. Such discrepancies may be characteristic of many ghost-written or collaborative narratives, and they may not always be as problematic as academics make them out to be. One could argue that an account relying on her diction and syntax might have been unpublishable (and virtually unreadable); is it not better to have a text written from her point of view than no story at all? Furthermore, a text reflecting her level of literacy might have given a misleading indication of her sensibility and intelligence: simple syntax may connote, even if it does not properly signify, simple mindedness. Still, when mediation is ignored, the resulting text may be (mis)taken for a transparent lens through which we have direct access to its subject (rather than to its author). And it is here that the veracity of the narrative as a first-person account of Sienkiewicz-Mercer's life may be called into question. On the one hand, Kaplan professes his concerns about possible distortions; on the other, he produces a text that Sienkiewicz-Mercer could never have produced even if some wondrous technology could transpose words directly from her mind to the page. Kaplan's claim that though "most of the words were not generated by Ruth [. . .] the thoughts and emotions, the impressions and observations expressed by these words, are Ruth's alone" (xii) assumes too much independence of content from form, message from medium. The liberties Kaplan takes with "translation" in effect hypernormalize Sienkiewicz-Mercer (if that is not an oxymoron). The problem is that the monological prose belies the very labor-intensive dialogical process by which it was produced; in fundamental ways, it masks or erases the disability that has so profoundly shaped its subject's life. Here, then, we have an odd ethical dilemma; the very mediation that seemingly empowers Sienkiewicz-Mercer is deceptive in some fundamental way. Representation in the political sense and representation in the mimetic sense seem fundamentally at odds: in his desire to speak for her, Kaplan speaks as her in a way that mis-speaks her.

In the scenario typical of celebrity autobiography,(7) the political dynamics are reversed: here the subject typically outranks the writer in wealth and clout. The balance of power favors the better known partner; there is only one Madonna, and she can presumably have her pick of partners.(8) We might schematize collaborative autobiography, then, by imagining examples as lying along a continuum from ethnographic autobiography, in which the writer outranks the subject, to celebrity autobiography, in which the subject outranks the writer. Although I would estimate that most collaborative narratives are situated at the ends of the continuum, significant numbers of texts can be found closer to the middle. At the very center, we would find texts produced by partners who are true peers - e.g., dual autobiographies - in which each partner contributes a separate narrative, and truly co-authored (rather than as-told-to) autobiographies.(9) Close to the center, but toward the ethnographic end of the continuum, would be found those single-author texts that Paul John Eakin calls relational lives - e.g., Spiegelman's Maus - and that I call "auto/biographies" for memoirs of proximate others, such as close relatives or partners, are often collaborative in some sense or degree. In these texts there is more than one subject, and the act of collaboration may itself be part of the narrative rather than treated in supplementary texts, as is the case at the ends of the continuum.

Wherever we are on the continuum, it makes little sense to discuss the "ethics" of collaborative autobiography in isolation from the politics of collaboration - or, for that matter, the economics of collaboration - for ethical problems are most likely to occur where there is a substantial political or economic differential between partners. Furthermore, different ethical issues tend to arise depending upon where the texts are located on this continuum. For example, violation of privacy tends to be more of an issue in relational lives, where the partners know each other intimately, than in most other forms of collaborative autobiography.

Ethical violations - inequities - occur mainly in two distinct but interrelated aspects of the project - the portrayal and the partnership. The justice of the portrayal has to do with whether the text represents its subject the way the subject would like to be represented, with whether that portrayal is in the subject's best interests, with the extent to which the subject has determined it, and with the degree and kind of harm done by any misrepresentation. Harm can be done to the subject's privacy, to his or her reputation, even to his or her integrity as an individual. Problems in the portrayal may be manifest in the text - or in its relation to other texts - and thus relatively easy for critics to detect. (Of course, as critics, we cannot correct but only correct for these problems.) Problems with portrayal are most likely to crop up when the subject's ability to audit and edit the manuscript is limited - that is, mainly in the ethnographic scenario. In cases like this, the critic may act, in effect, as the advocate of the subject, whose life may have been inaccurately portrayed or unfairly appropriated.

In many, perhaps most, cases of ethnographic collaboration, the subjects never confront their published alter egos; their "lives" appear in print elsewhere, among those who do write, and they are damaged neither by the process nor by its product (which is not to say that the process may not be in some way exploitative). Black Elk Speaks, by John G. Neihardt, however, offers an interesting case in which the subject of the narrative was discomfited by it in ways he could not have anticipated.(10) The production of this story involved not just translation from Black Elk's Lakota to Neihardt's English but a complex cross-cultural collaboration involving members of Black Elk's family and tribe and members of Neihardt's family. Despite Neihardt's good intentions, it is now possible to tell, thanks to the recuperative work of Raymond DeMallie, that - and how - Neihardt imposed his own agenda on the resulting text. In particular, he was at pains to suppress the evidence of Black Elk's acculturation. To this end, Neihardt ended the narrative with the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 and omitted any mention or acknowledgement of Black Elk's conversion to Roman Catholicism early in the twentieth century.

In theory, it would have been possible for Black Elk to have reviewed the text; it could have been translated back to him by the same collaborators who produced the transcripts. Such a process would have been difficult, however, and it would not necessarily have enabled him to assess the implications of publishing this account of his life. As it happened, he was not given the opportunity to audit the text. And, as DeMallie reveals, when the book was published, it became a source of some discomfort to him. The reservation clergy were upset that the book portrayed their model convert as an unreconstructed "longhair." Although we have no way of knowing Black Elk's full response to this, we do know that he felt impelled to "speak" again - in a document that reaffirmed his Christian faith. Indeed, he complained that he had wanted Neihardt to include a chapter narrating his conversion. Although it is tempting to read these complaints as induced by clerical pressure, it appears that Neihardt's representation of Black Elk did not completely conform to his self-image and the accepted image of him in his community. The aftermath of publication suggests that he felt that the book did him some injustice (DeMallie 60).(11)

The equity of the partnership has to do with the conditions and division of labor and the distribution of the proceeds. Since this aspect has more to do with the process than with the textual product of the collaboration, violations here may not be manifest in the text and are less easy for critics to detect. (Issues of ownership and distribution of the proceeds of the collaboration are generally least accessible to our inspection.) In the case of Black Elk, the equity of the partnership, as well as of the portrayal, have come into question: DeMallie's research uncovered a letter in which Black Elk complained that he had not been compensated as promised for his contribution to the book (DeMallie 59-63).

A prime concern with any partnership is whether collaboration is truly voluntary or somehow coerced. Most of us would imagine inequities of partnership as occurring exclusively in the ethnographic scenario, as part of its presumably imperialistic nature, but they may occur in the celebrity scenario as well. There the relationship between subject and writer is sometimes effectively that between employer and employee, with all the potential for abuse that lies in such relations. According to Andrew Szanton, a professional writer of autobiographies,(12) writers have more at risk economically in these collaborations than subjects do, since the project often represents the writers' livelihood but rarely that of the subjects, who are generally financially secure. That economic security may, of course, make them generous. In some instances, subjects may in effect give away their life stories, but these are generally not the most marketable ones. In any case, there is some potential even in the celebrity scenario for economic exploitation.

A case of a writer claiming exploitation is that of William Novak, who agreed to a flat fee for writing his first celebrity autobiography, Iacocca, which then surprised him by becoming a best-seller. When his request for a share of the paperback royalties was turned down, Novak felt he had been cheated out of his fair share of the proceeds. He complained publicly, to no avail (Wyden). Despite any inequity in the distributions of proceeds, Novak had no legal recourse, having signed a contract that afforded him no royalties, and his ethical position was undermined by the fact that Iacocca donated his royalties to charity. In any case, to the extent that his career took off after (and as a result of) his writing of Iacocca, the inequity was at least partially redressed.

Another ethical dilemma characteristic of celebrity autobiography is the possible conflict between the writer's obligation to portray the subject as he or she would wish and the obligation to the historical record. Michael Korda has written instructively on the problem that Ronald Reagan's selective memory posed for his collaborator, Robert Lindsey. For example, Reagan remembered a tete a tete with Mikhail Gorbachev in a boathouse on Lake Geneva as a turning point in his negotiations with Gorbachev in November 1985; in fact, the two had not been alone together but rather surrounded by a number of translators and security people (Korda 92). More problematically, although Reagan spent the war years in Hollywood, he remembered having been present with the United States Signal Corps at the liberation of the German concentration camps - a memory appropriated from documentary film of that process (93). Such lapses in memory force collaborators to choose between serving as compliant corroborators and functioning as reality checks, between loyalty to their subjects and fidelity to historical truth. Each collaborator needs to decide how aggressively and extensively to check the accuracy of the record he is helping to create. The biographer's position is different: for him or her, there is a clear obligation to check the record and no necessary obligation to the subject - -except in the case of the authorized biographer. Autobiographers, interestingly, are generally not viewed as obliged to research their own lives; the presumed subjectivity of the genre gains them a degree of latitude.

The professional autobiographer may, like Andrew Szanton, think of his role as analogous to that of the defense attorney, who may know more than he divulges and whose ethical obligation is to put the best possible face on his client's behavior without outright deception. This may be the proper ethical stance for the professional collaborator; the professional critic, however, is justified in putting a higher value on historical truth. In cases, especially ethnographic ones, in which the model, or source, is taken advantage of by the writer, the ethical duty of the critic may be to defend the disenfranchised subject; in the case of celebrity autobiography, the ethical duty of the critic may be to protect the historical record.

Collaborations, like these, with celebrities are always consensual; in any case, they also have built-in checks and balances that may deter or at least minimize exploitation. Each partner may use for leverage the indispensability of his or her contribution. Celebrity subjects would seem to have the upper hand, since presumably their stories are the sine qua non of the project(13); they can threaten to cease cooperating and choose other partners. But their lives are not copyrightable, and if they cease cooperating, their collaborators may point out that, in order to protect their investment of time and labor, their only alternative is to turn what were to be autobiographies into biographies. Their leverage lies in the fact that, though presumably not as marketable as collaborative autobiographies, biographies do not have to be as flattering. (Biographers' ethical obligations to their subjects are quite different from those of collaborators; indeed, contemporary biography would suggest that biographers feel little or no ethical obligation to their subjects.(14)) In the case of collaborative celebrity autobiography, then, the dynamics of the collaboration serve to minimize the potential for inequity in both dimensions - that of the portrayal and that of the partnership; subjects unhappy with their portrayals can demand revisions; writers unhappy with the terms of the collaboration can try to renegotiate them.

Nevertheless, such checks and balances sometimes fail to prevent dissension; like the marriages to which they are often compared, collaborative partnerships sometimes come apart, sometimes acrimoniously. A pertinent case here is the story of the failed collaboration between Fay Vincent, the former commissioner of baseball, and David A. Kaplan. Vincent withdrew from the collaboration on his memoir, Baseball Breaks Your Heart, as the manuscript was nearing completion in 1994, apparently because he was reluctant to publish a book that would revive the controversies in which he had been involved (Sandomir). (Vincent did not challenge the accuracy of the manuscript but rather its tone; the real issue seemed to be hostile references to people he was dealing with at the time, such as George Steinbrenner. Implicitly, then, he was suggesting that publication of the book would do him harm: cause him pain by rekindling some of the antagonisms of his years in office.) In the summer of 1997, Kaplan took Vincent to court, claiming the right, as co-author and joint copyright owner, to publish the book on his own; his claim was, in effect, that Vincent had deprived him of the fruits of his labor.

Such a conflict between collaborators points up an issue close to the heart of collaborative autobiography: whose property is the collaboratively produced life story? Vincent's position is that, although he shared copyright with Kaplan, he retained control of the final manuscript; as his lawyer remarked: "How could it be any other way? Otherwise, it's giving your life story to someone else." The answer to the question "Whose life is it, anyway?" may not be as simple as Vincent's lawyer suggests, since the manuscript in question was in part the product of Kaplan's work - including independent research. The nonpartisan legal opinions cited in the New York Times, however, come down mostly on Vincent's side, on the principle that, unless he explicitly gave up control over the manuscript, he should still be assumed to have it. As one copyright lawyer put it: "people working on a collaboration about their own lives tend to control their stories, until they give up control." (This is not as tautological as it sounds.) But Vincent's case rests uneasily on "oral agreements" he claims to have made with Kaplan; in a preliminary ruling, the judge "wrote that he was not persuaded that the coauthors were bound by an oral contract."

In ethnographic autobiography, where the balance of power favors the writer over the subject, the ethical pitfalls are quite different. Collaboration is supposedly a matter of give and take, but in the ethnographic scenario the most obvious danger is the taking of liberties - the appropriation of a life story for purposes not shared, understood, or consented to by the subject. This is a particular danger of the ethnographic scenario because - as was evidently the case with Black Elk - differences of culture may impede or prevent the obtaining of truly informed consent. The same may be true, as indicated above, of differences in age or somatic condition; indeed, I would put most parental memoirs of children and some disability narratives in the ethnographic category. For instance, Michael Dorris's Broken Cord, his account of raising an adopted son whose development was affected by Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, fits both categories: it is a parental memoir of a disabled child that conforms disturbingly to the ethnographic scenario. One consequence of Dorris's discovery of the source of Adam's problems - his birth-mother's alcoholism - is the tendency to treat him as a type rather than as an individual. While the early chapters focus on Adam's problems of development, he is portrayed there as a fully individualized character. As is the case in most parental narratives of impaired children, the emphasis is on efforts to maximize his potential, despite his limitations. Emphasis begins to shift to what Adam cannot do after Dorris and Erdrich adopt other Native American children, who exemplify "norms" that Adam doesn't measure up to (see, for example, 120, 127-29). This tendency culminates in the book's peroration, which offers a litany of things Adam will never understand or appreciate (264).

After the moment of "diagnosis," Adam tends to become a type and his story a case history; emphasis shifts to his generic (genetic) traits and to larger cultural problems. And eventually, as narrator, Dorris abandons the role of advocate for his son and takes up the role of crusader against the use of alcohol by pregnant women. Indeed, insofar as Adam's problems are seen to result from cultural pathology in the Native American community, the book veers toward ethnographic life writing, or even ethnography proper. Dorris assumes the role of the outside expert or anthropological authority - usually a non-native - who enlists in a collaborative life-writing project a native subject not otherwise inclined to generate an autobiography. It is unusual, and troubling, that in this instance the role of the anthropologist is assumed by a parent and that the "informant" is his son. The crucial difference from most ethnography, however, is that here the disparity between the two parties is not a difference in race or culture; rather, that disparity is a function of Adam's congenital FAS-related cognitive disabilities, which, though related to patterns of Indian alcohol abuse, are not intrinsic to his cultural heritage. In practice, then, though for very different reasons than those operating in most earlier texts, this book's production involved the sort of asymmetrical collaboration typical of ethnographic autobiography, in which the editor tends to exercise cultural authority over his "subject."(15)

What is tendered as autonomous self-representation - the appended narrative by the son, "The Story of Adam Dorris by Adam Dorris" - is in effect mediated in ways the putative autobiographer cannot understand or control. Just as he seemed incapable of adjusting his appearance in everyday life to the expectations of others, Adam could not fully imagine, and thus could not censor, the way he was being presented to a reading public. In this case, the subject is put at a disadvantage not so much by his culture as by his disability. Despite Dorris's noble intentions, then, he produced a book in which disability assumes the role of cultural difference in defining and subjugating the Other in anthropological discourse. Although Dorris did elicit Adam's testimony, that testimony serves mainly to corroborate Dorris's characterization of Adam in the narrative that precedes and introduces it. Adam's text is contained and defined by his father's. On the whole, then, Dorris seems to have arrogated authority in ways reminiscent of "colonial" ethnography.

Collaborative autobiography is inherently ventriloquistic. The dynamics of the ventriloquism, however - the direction in which the voice is "thrown" - may vary with the location of the collaboration on the continuum described earlier. In ethnographic autobiography, the danger tends to be that of attributing to the subject a voice and narrative not originating with him or her - and that he or she may not have edited. Black Elk Speaks is a classic example; indeed, the most frequently quoted paragraphs have turned out to be wholly Neihardt's invention. This danger exists, of course, in celebrity autobiography, as well; some celebrities - notably Darryl Strawberry and Ronald Reagan - have notoriously not read, much less written, their so-called "autobiographies." But, unlike Black Elk, they could have reviewed the prose ascribed to them. In celebrity autobiography, perhaps the greater danger is the reverse dynamic, in which the subject assumes or is given more credit for the writing than is legitimate. Although I am otherwise excluding ghostwritten autobiography from consideration here - that is, the use of an unacknowledged collaborator - I would point out that, by academic standards, ghostwritten autobiography is tantamount to plagiarism. If the ghostwriter consents to being anonymous, as is usually the case, the process is not plagiarism in the sense of appropriation of another's intellectual property without permission: the arrangement is that the writer's compensation takes the form of a paycheck: and not a byline,(16) so there's no violation of the partnership. And of course the wide acceptance of the practice - like that of Presidential speechwriting by ghosts - suggests that there is not considered to be any dishonesty involved because none but the most naive might be fooled. Here is a good example of a case where the ethics of trade publishing and those of academic publishing differ sharply. But a ghostwritten autobiography does, I think, raise a minor ethical issue with regard to the truthfulness of the portrayal. The text implicitly falsities both the history of its subject - who did not in fact labor singlehandedly to produce it - and his or her image: he or she may not be a person capable of writing such a text.

Looked at from another angle, the projection of the voice of the writer or interlocutor onto the subject is tantamount to forgery.(17) This occurs mainly with ghostwritten celebrity autobiography, where the signature of the source may be worth more than the signature of the writer. As Philippe Lejeune points out, with ethnographic collaboration, the "story takes its value, in the eyes of the reader, from the fact that [the subjects] belong (that they are perceived as belonging) to a culture other than his own, a culture defined by the exclusion of writing" (196). A complex but relatively mild form of this problem seems to have occurred in the literary aftermath of the death of Diana Spencer. Andrew Morton, the author of a biography called Diana, Her True Story, claimed, after her death, that his title had been an understatement: the book was not merely a true story but her story in the sense that she was its principle source (Hoge). Accordingly, he rushed into print a new version with the amended title: Diana, Her True Story - In Her Own Words. In effect, then, Morton claimed that a book presented originally as "his" biography of her was in fact a covertly collaborative life-writing project - a sort of ghostwritten biography, or pseudonymous autobiography in the third person. His claims raise ethical issues aside from the questionable propriety of his attempt to capitalize on Diana's death by reviving his "life" of her. If his claim is not true, then this case is an instance of one ethical violation, forgery - the false attribution of material to the "subject" of the book in order to heighten its apparent authenticity (and thus, not incidentally, its already considerable commercial value). If it is true, the act is probably a violation of a pledge to keep her contribution confidential.

Forged or ventriloquistic autobiography may take less benign forms than this - if we broaden our scope beyond those practices usually deemed literary or anthropological. As Margreta de Grazia has pointed out, a false confession obtained by means of torture might euphemistically be described as "collaborative autobiography"; such a text would obviously involve inequity in portrayal as well as of "partnership"; in such cases, both the process and the product may be extremely harmful to the subject. Indeed, here the faking of a life may quite literally involve the taking of a life. The extortion of a true confession - that is, a confession to a crime the confessor did commit - could also be described only euphemistically as a collaborative autobiography. The dynamics of the "confessions" of condemned prisoners in England in the eighteenth century can illustrate how the ethnographic and the celebrity scenarios may complement one another. In-house confessions "dictated" to prison ordinaries and distributed at the time of execution - as if spontaneous and simultaneous with the execution - were sometimes supplemented by extramural accounts written by journalists for a popular audience. The in-house "confessions," which were coerced, sometimes by torture, reflected the authority of the state in more than one sense: they were scripted according to narrow conventions and reflected the apparent internalization of self-condemning social norms. (They were confessions in the religious and moral as well as the legal sense.) In contrast, convicts might arrange to produce, with the collaboration of an independent journalist like Daniel Defoe, a quite different sort of testimony - a kind of criminal's celebrity memoir. Prisoners would be treated more favorably in terms of both process and portrayal in the extramural confessions than in the intramural ones. Though they might be formulaic, these texts were more voluntarily produced, and the subject was more in control of his own representation. While these accounts might be preferred on ethical grounds because of their less compulsory quality, they would of course be more at odds with the official ethos.(18)

Further examples of subtly coercive - and thus unethical - collaborative life writing may be found in abuses of psychiatric practice. Most forms of psychotherapy involve - indeed, consist of - what might be seen as "collaborative autobiography." What is ideally a benign and therapeutic process, however, is liable to ethical misuse (like any collaboration with a professional, such as a physician or lawyer). Obvious examples may be found in the "recovering" of false memories of abuse or other trauma - except that here we have not coerced confession but coerced accusation - autobiography as character assassination.

Another relevant distinction between collaborative life-writing scenarios may be found in the degree of professionalization of the authors. Today, ethnography in the narrow sense is produced by professional anthropologists, who are currently haunted by the complicity of ethnography in imperialism, cultural or otherwise. Indeed, ethnography and ethnographic life writing have been so thoroughly theorized and analyzed as to have been virtually paralyzed. By a broader definition, of course, the ethnographic scenario includes amateur practices, such as Neihardt's collaboration with Black Elk, in which professional ethics are nonexistent or not highly developed. Similarly, those who write celebrity autobiography for a living are not organized professionally; they are a relatively small number of freelancers who function according to their own lights, rather than any established ethical discourse or guidelines (Szanton interview). Finally, those who collaborate in scenarios toward the middle of the continuum between ethnographic and celebrity collaboration - for example, parental biographers of children or those who collaborate with the ill and the disabled to write their lives - are generally even less conscious of being part of a professional group with ethical restraints.

Collaborative autobiography is practiced today with great frequency and openness. At least, this is one implication of a recent Steiner cartoon in the New Yorker. The scene is an elementary school classroom, complete with a globe on the teacher's desk and a flag in the corner. Two students, a boy and a girl, stand next to the teacher's desk, facing the rest of their class. The boy smiles smugly, hands clasped behind his back, while the girl reads from a paper she is holding: "'What I did last summer,' by Scott Sweningen, as told to Samantha Gerhart." The teacher's expression is impossible to read, but one wonders about the elementary ethics here; what would clearly be cheating, if done surreptitiously - the writing of one student's composition by another - is apparently acceptable when done openly. The joke is, I guess, that collaborative autobiography has trickled down to the level of the cliched first assignment of the school year. If this cartoon is an indication, collaborative autobiography will only become more common; if that is so, we need to extend and intensify our consideration of the full range of ethical issues it raises.

We may apply ethical standards in two different scenarios. One is retrospective; we may investigate and stand in judgment of the ethics of published texts. The other is prospective; we may seek to head off ethical violations by setting forth guidelines to influence future life writing. Whichever scenario we operate within, our influence and power are indirect and diffuse. We need to remember that, as critics of life writing, we occupy a distinct and awkward position with respect to the practice of it; our ethics may be at odds with the ethics of those - professional as well as amateur - who practice collaborative life writing. And we need to be attentive to the benefits as well as the liabilities of collaboration. For example, it may be tempting to decry ethnographic autobiography insofar as it may seem inherently to reduce its subjects to types. But such an objection to ethnography may invoke values, such as that of the uniqueness of the individual, that are alien to some of the cultures it seeks to represent. It may be, too, that the recuperative benefits of ethnography outweigh its costs. For example, it could be argued that, despite Neihardt's taking of some liberties in his collaboration with Black Elk, the text they produced collaboratively has helped to preserve and to disseminate Lakota culture; Black Elk and his people have benefitted from the collaboration in ways he may not fully have anticipated. In any case, it may be unwise for us to devise ethical principles that would effectively censor or censure whole genres of life writing. Literary critics may have an important role to play in the ongoing development of collaborative life writing - particularly if we extend our consideration beyond the texts traditionally considered literary - but we need to be careful of self-righteousness - of devising, in the isolation of the ivory tower, excessively fastidious principles.

Notes

1 Other forms of life writing also involve collaboration - more so than is sometimes acknowledged. Biography - even when not authorized - is never done single-handedly, at least when living sources are consulted. Autobiography is often, perhaps almost always, a relational enterprise. Even when it is not, it may require backstage consultation with others to fill in memory's gaps. I confine myself, however, to autobiographical projects that involve conscious and active cooperation.

2 More technical terms for narrator and protagonist are "the subject speaking" and "the subject spoken," as used by de Grazia (290). While useful, these terms also seem to me clumsy.

3 "Subject" is today an ambiguous, multivalent term: grammatically, it suggests agency; politically, it suggests the opposite - passivity or subordination; in poststructuralism, it suggests constructedness and provisionality. Here I use it in none of these senses, but rather the everyday sense of "topic" - in this case, the person the book is about.

Some critics refer to the subject of collaborative autobiography as the "dictator," others as the "speaker." In the case of ethnographic autobiography, "dictator" seems too often ironic, in view of the political meaning of that term; that is, it implies a kind of dominance not characteristic of the usual speaker; in the cases of celebrity autobiography, it may be more apt, but even there it underestimates the agency of the collaborator.

The problem with using the term "speaker" for those Philippe Lejeune refers to as "those who do not write" is that some who do not write do not speak either. I am thinking here not so much of deaf people, who may use Sign to communicate their narratives and who generally can read the written narrative their collaborators produce, but rather those whose disability may prevent speech and Sign as well as writing - such as those with cerebral palsy or other such disorders. In any case, "speaker" implies the ability to speak, which is not universally the case, and cases of disability are extremely interesting and problematic in this regard. See my discussion of Sienkiewicz-Mercer below.

What to call the other partner is also problematic: "author" is sometimes technically correct, but sometimes the collaborators are co-authors. Even when they are not, "author" may ascribe the resulting text unfairly to one partner. Similarly,. "writer" may overstate the interviewer's role, while "editor" usually understates it. Because in most cases one partner does most of what we usually mean by "write" - inscribe words by hand in lasting form - I use "writer" for the partner more responsible for the composition of the text.

4 In the classic analysis of "The Autobiography of Those Who Do Not Write," Philippe Lejeune minimizes the difference between solo and collaborative autobiography, arguing that collaborative autobiography exposes the different roles involved even in the production of solo autobiography:

A person is always several people when he is writing, even all alone, even his own life. [. . .] By relatively isolating the roles, the collaborative autobiography calls into question again the belief in a unity that underlies, in the autobiographical genre, the notion of author and that of person. We can divide the work in this way only because it is in fact always divided in this way, even when the people who are writing fail to recognize this, because they assume the different roles themselves. Anyone who decides to write his life story acts as if he were his own ghostwriter. (188)

While this is a shrewd observation, it can be disregarded here because an intrapersonal division of labor does not raise the ethical issues inherent in an interpersonal collaboration.

5 And, as it happens, those in the publishing business sometimes use the marriage analogy for collaborative writing partnerships.

6 See my chapter "HIV/AIDS and Its Stories" in Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability. and Life Writing, especially the section "Family Plots: Relational AIDS Memoirs."

7 I am tempted to call this form of life writing "celebritory" [sic] autobiography; I regard it as a peculiar modern version of hagiography.

8 Rosemary J. Coombe has argued that celebrity identity is authored collaboratively and collectively, rather than individually. Nevertheless, in the marketplace, the celebrity has the advantage of licensing his/her own replication.

9 An example of the former would be Cancer in Two Voices by Sandra Butler and Barbara Rosenblum.

10 For a fuller account of this example, see my chapter "Black Elk Speaks With Forked Tongue," in Altered Egos: Authority in American Autobiography, 189-209.

11 I do not want to portray Black Elk as merely a victim in this process. It is likely that the book reflected his shrewd use of an unfamiliar medium - autobiography - to convey his vision to a larger audience. Each partner may have used the other in ways of which the other was unaware.

12 Szanton has written the memoirs of Eugene Wigner, a Hungarian-born Manhattan Project physicist, and of Charles Evers, a civil rights leader and brother of Medgar Evers; he is currently writing the memoirs of former Massachusetts Senator, Edward Brooke.

13 Such stories are not always worth what publishers pay for them. For example, according to Michael Korda, of Simon and Schuster, although Presidential memoirs usually lose money, publishers may still be seduced by the glamour of having an ex-president as a "author" (88).

14 It is hard to imagine a contemporary biographer concluding, as M.O.W. Oliphant did one hundred years ago, that a biographer who discovers unexpected flaws in his or her subject "might well consider not writing the biography at all" (Bergmann 3).

15 For a full consideration of this book, see my essay "Raising Adam."

16 Indeed, just as writers who take pride in their craft may insist on controlling the final text, they might also prefer not to have attributed to them a work that reflects the verbal invention of their subjects.

17 See de Grazia on the distinction between plagiarism and forgery (299).

18 My account of these memoirs is indebted to Hal Gladfelder's 1997 MLA paper, "'I Want to Tell You': Ghost Authors and Criminal Subjects in the Eighteenth Century."

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