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Is it ethical to write about real people in art? Has society fed reality TV and has social media lost all sense of value in privacy, wonders Peter Kelly?…

Kai-Age Knausgard divorced his wife and moved back in with his mother. He then proceeded to drink himself to death in a manner not to dissimilar to Nicholas Cage’s character in the movie Leaving Las Vegas.

Kai-Age’s son, Karl Ove Knausgard, a critically acclaimed novelist, then decided to write about his father’s tragic spiral in the book My Struggle. The novel, part of a six-book series, was a massive commercial success. The Wall Street Journal described him as “one of the 21st century’s greatest literary sensations”.

The books are presented as novels but are essentially memoirs in fiction format. Members of Karl Ove’s family felt betrayed by the novels. Some took legal action and tried to prevent publication. Some have challenged the accuracy of how he has portrayed some of the characters, i.e. family members in the books.

Sold his soul to the devil

Particular offence has been taken by how he portrayed his grandmother and her alcoholism. Karl Ove admitted in an interview that he sold his soul to the devil and received a large reward for it.

I have often wondered if Karl Ove paved the way for Richard Gadd’s creation Baby Reindeer. Baby Reindeer watches as fiction but is largely memoir. It too encountered legal challenges and accusations of inaccurate portrayals of real people.

Classic novels have always been based on real people and real stories but presented and camouflaged so as not to reveal who those people really are.

There is almost an etiquette to this, an unwritten rule. Don’t air your dirty laundry in public. Respect the privacy of others. Of course, people have written memoirs before where they were unflattering of family members.

Frank McCourt’s book Angela’s Ashes springs to mind. But Karl Ove and Richard Gadd both went for a level of unsavoury detail and honesty that felt shocking and unprecedented.

Has society fed reality TV and has social media lost all sense of value in privacy? No doubt these stories make great art but is the fallout worth the endeavour?

Is there a psychological price to pay for exposing other people’s flaws and sins to the world in such a public way? What effect has it had on your personal relationships? Current relationships may break down as people feel betrayed but also future relationships may prove difficult as people feel you may, in a later project, expose some of their vulnerabilities.

This is touched upon in the book Yellowface, where some of the characters speak bitterly of how the novelist Athena Liu stole their personal stories and put them in her fictitious writing.

True crime as a genre of entertainment has exploded in popularity ever since the podcast Serial was launched in 2014. Often, the families of the victims in these stories are not only not consulted about how their loved ones will be portrayed, sometimes they don’t even know the series is coming out until it is released.

Is the monetisation of someone’s murder for the entertainment of the masses ethical? In a recent true crime meets Edinburgh fringe comedy, a podcast called Wisecrack has become a big hit. It is about a murder in a small village outside London.

The bit that stuck with me during most of the series was when the ex-husband of a murdered women tells comedian Ed Hedges that he had heard he had written a comedy show about her murder.

When this man first heard there was a comedy show about his ex-wife’s murder, what must he have thought?

Most people think ‘comedy show’ when they think of Peter Kay or Michael McIntyre. How can you write a comedy show about a murder? However, people who follow the Edinburgh Fringe will be very aware of Hannah Gadsby’s show Nanette and how there is now a perception that for a show to win a comedy award at Edinburgh, it needs to contain some pathos. Comedy actors never win Oscars and funny, funny never wins Edinburgh.

Is it ethical to write about real people in your art? There are no right answers to such questions. I could never write about my own family the way Karl Ove did.

As for Richard Gadd, luckily I have never had a stalker or any interest from the comedy industry, so I’m not sure what I would do in such a situation. I don’t think I could ever write a comedy show about a murder.

There is a pressure for artists to present work that is real but trends change and John Updike’s rabbit books are better art than Karl Ove’s books and they are pure fiction.

Peter Kelly, a pharmacist and stand-up comedian based in London, has launched a podcast as his comedy alter ego Jack Hester where he interviews other comedians on their spiritual and religious beliefs called Does God Exist.