“Keep me out of your novels”, wrote Yasmin Kureishi to her brother Hanif, via the medium of an article in The Independent (naturally).

This was in 2008, when Kureishi’s novel Something to Tell You was released, four years after My Ear at His Heart, a memoir about his failed-writer father. Yasmin’s list of literary disloyalties continued: “my mother and father in The Buddha of Suburbia; Uncle Omar, portrayed as an alcoholic in a bedsit in My Beautiful Laundrette, then lauded in Hanif's memoir, My Ear at his Heart…” And it went on.

Writing – particularly non-fiction – has taken a rather personal turn in recent years: it’s the era of TMI (too much information) journalism, in which writing about one’s sexual fantasies, disappointments, trapped tampons, boredom and self-loathing is de rigueur. Even former politicians – such as Tony “I was an animal following my instinct” Blair – are happy to recount their sex lives in sick-making detail.

Readers, inevitably, love a bit of indiscretion. I know I do. While everyone ridicules The Daily Mail’s supreme queen of TMI, Liz Jones, we still flock like schadenfreude-hungry sheep to her articles – in which there is no personal failure, paranoid musing or non-event too shameful or dull to recount in painstaking, lunatic detail. It’s catnip for internet commenters – probably the most profitable type of journalism around.

No wonder, then, that TMI is such a popular genre. The American market in particular is clogged with “personal essayists”, who treat every friendship, sexual tryst and waking minute as fodder for their work.

Sometimes, indiscretion can be illuminating – Eryn Loeb’s recent piece in The Awl, My Former Best Friend’s Wedding, was a remarkably poignant examination of pseudo-friendships on Facebook. You don’t even need to have lived a particularly interesting life in order write about it. Just look at Heather B Armstrong and her lifestyle blog, Dooce – one of her most recent posts consists of 800 words on dog farts. Yes, dog farts.

Meanwhile, former Gawker writer Emily Gould’s memoir And the Heart Says Whatever recounts her thrilling life as a student and lovesick blogger, and Sloane Crosley became a literary sensation thanks to her fluffy, witty essays about being young in New York.

Millions of New Yorkers lead more fascinating lives than Crosley, but somehow her weird-ish neighbours and ever-so-slightly challenging jobs kept me reading her first collection, I Was Told There’d Be Cake, to its very end. Why are we interested in such pedestrian lives? Perhaps it is because they reflect our own, but what happens to the boyfriends, former friends and family whose privacy is sold out?

Just ask Yasmin Kureishi – although she did accept that all writers “should be able to take from their experiences”. After all, some of the most memorable fictional characters were based on real people, from Lewis Carroll’s Alice to Jack Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty.

But there is, in the end, a difference between borrowing elements of a person’s character or writing an affectionate fictionalisation of a friend, and performing a hatchet job.

Steal from life, but beware of the consequences. Better still – make it all up.

Drop me a line.

Image courtesy of 3fold on Flickr.

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