Servants were witness to the most intimate details of white households from marriages, infidelities, divorces, sickness and deaths as well as the minor events such as school activities, first boyfriends and girlfriends; all the things which give shape and narrative to an ordinary family’s existence.  Whether or not the relationship between a housekeeper and the family was good, the very nature of the situation meant that it was invariably intimate. Sometimes the relationships were close, though they were usually strange and sad. I attended a wedding at which the housekeeper and the gardener of the bride’s parents stood at the back of the church for the ceremony and afterwards were given a cooler box with sodas, beer and sandwiches to enjoy in the park while the white guests attended the reception at a hotel. It was not simply a question of the white guests excluding the black guests; the housekeeper and the gardener would have been deeply uncomfortable at the reception. But the housekeeper, it is worth noting, was part mother to the bride during her childhood and confidant to the bride’s mother during her divorce.

In other countries we tend to think of the relationship between employer and servant in terms of class, but in South Africa the social system was engineered such that class coincided with race. This difference both enabled the intimacy and created sufficient ‘cultural space’ to make the relationship between employer and servant in a modest home possible. A white woman would be less concerned about her black servant knowing intimate details about her life than someone from her own community. When a black maid became a surrogate parent to a white child, the situation was less threatening to the parents precisely because the surrogate was black.  Equally the indignity of serving an average middle class family, in particular the children, was mitigated by the fact that it was not in your community. Maids could speak to one-another in a language we did not understand and return to communities we would not know or visit. Moreover it was easy to distance ourselves from what we were doing because of apartheid, irrespective of what one’s political convictions may have been. You, the servant, find yourself in the position you are in, because you are black, and you may unite with your brothers and sisters of our kitchens and backyards against the injustice and indignity of the situation, but it is an external and seemingly immutable force configuring these relationships. Apartheid meant that even in the same room there was enough separateness, to make the situation tolerable.

I am curious as to the relationships that exist between black families and their housekeepers in South Africa today.  Not only will these relationships not have the same degree of ‘cultural space’ in terms of language and background but there must be precious few black South Africans who don’t have a family member that at one time or another found themselves in the employ of a white household. Most black South Africans will at the very least have strong connections to townships and rural communities where this servant class are from. If the relationship between employer and servant is slowly being transformed from one of race to one of class, which implies a space (also to some extent ideological in nature given the ANC’s embrace of an uncompromising capitalism) it can never in any way resemble the ‘separateness’ that existed before. For me a comparable situation would be to grow up with an older Afrikaans woman as a housekeeper, and whatever it may say about the effect South Africa had on me, I find the idea almost impossible to contemplate; the shared culture would not allow sufficient distance to make the enforced intimacy possible.

Our housekeeper worked for my family for twenty years before retiring after I left for university. With Janice* seeing to the everyday household chores my mother was able to complete her PhD while we attended primary school. South Africa was so deeply patriarchal, that even in a supposedly liberal family like ours, there was no question of my father preparing meals or cleaning the house. As uncomfortable as the relationship makes us, employing a housekeeper had a significant impact on my mother’s life. But these relationships also brought benefits to the servant. Not only was the income important in supporting extended families, employment often meant hand-me-down school books, bags and uniforms, emergency loans and on rare occasions the presence of a white employer who might intercede with bureaucrats or police or the other machinery of government that seemed to whir dangerously beneath one, if you were part of the large black underclass.

To a lesser extent this is still true today although the nature of domestic employment is gradually being transformed through legislation. I believe that the practice of engaging domestic servants is wrong. The closeness between servants and white children often came about because maids were, and still are, separated from their children for extended periods – the children of the employer were surrogates too. These relationships, however loving and close, are borne of an unnecessary and sometimes damaging separation that cannot be justified by what is, after all, just laziness. Janice left school at fourteen and began employment the following year. She confided that as a child she had hopes of becoming a nurse. These were not the sorts of confessions we liked to dwell upon. After all, who wants to be made complicit in unfulfilled dreams and wasted potential? However if I lived in South Africa today, and I had the means, I would probably still employ a housekeeper, and not only because I am lazy.  In a country with high unemployment, low levels of education and a grossly uneven distribution of wealth, you’d have to be a very high minded and cold person not to provide an unskilled job if you could. The challenge is to ensure that the practise does not become so entrenched that out of apartheid arises a class system so rigid and intractable that it resembles what preceded it. For this is unlikely to stir the sympathy of the world and will be much harder to overcome.

* Name has been changed

(1) The interviewer is asking them to distil everything that they love about the vast tidal wave of text that is literature into a single book. Simply by answering the question they do an insult to the canon.

(2) The interviewer is asking them to assign a metonymic function to a book; choose a book that represents you, in your varied complexity and ambiguity. Reduce yourself to only one book.

(3) If you are deliberately cultivating a fan base or voters there is a complex interplay between taking yourself too seriously, being flippant and (worst of all) being obvious and boring. You can feel the strain: I’m one of the people, just like you! But I am also smart. I appreciate literature with a capital ‘L’ even though people think I’m vacant and facile.

No matter what book people choose, it’s invariably disappointing. My reaction is generally, ‘Yeah – that’s a good book. It’s a very good book. But that? That’s your totemic piece of literature? Of everything you could choose that stood out? Jeez, I guess you’re just not as cool as I thought you were.’ Of course it’s even more disappointing when they opt for the standard bail out: ‘Oh, there are too many books,’ they say, ‘I couldn’t possibly choose just one.’  That’s when you want to say, ‘Oh go on! Nail your colours to the mast! You will disappoint – but gives us your best shot you coward!’

Of course I am glad I don’t have to this answer this question because I couldn’t choose one book. But I suppose for a writer the question of influences is different. Famous writers are always telling aspiring writers to ‘read, read and read some more’ but they seem to differ on why this is good advice. Some imply that through a process of osmosis you unconsciously absorb good writing technique. Others suggest that to benefit from good writing you need to make a deliberate study of the techniques they use. You liked that passage? Well read it again and this time analyse what it is the writer did. How did they evoke that response? In the work of Murial Spark for example, it’s interesting to see how she uses heightened language for comedic passages and a more paired back, direct style for serious ones. Of course this technique is employed by lots of writers, but Spark does it so well. Her use of repetition is also pitch perfect and highly evocative.

Some of the most important influences are the one’s the give you permission to do things you wouldn’t otherwise consider. When you read Phillip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint you realise ‘Oh – you can go there. You can go that far.’ And when you read Douglas Coupland you realise it’s perfectly ok, if done with sufficient skill, for the authorial voice to intrude, to riff, on this or that matter, to litter the text with ‘babies’ while everyone else is calling for immediate and ruthless infanticide. The best writers are way ahead, slashing through the thicket of rules and advice, clearing the path for the rest of us to follow.

But there is more than that. The great authors are like deep reservoirs of writing fuel; their writing is so deeply and richly associative that it sparks off dozens of your own memories and ideas and experiences. For me JM Coetzee does this every time. Whenever he eviscerates one of his characters I usually feel a bit roughed up too.

Finally there’s that group of people who aren’t necessarily fiction writers, but are equally inspiring. Whatever you may think about Freud he articulated the conflict that sits at the heart of every good character: the vast difference between your childish fantasies of what the world and you should be, versus what you and the world actually are. And though he may not have been of the psychoanalytic school, these Freudian conflicts are wonderfully and theatrically realised in the experiments of Stanley Milgram. Has there ever been a more compelling piece of psychological research than the obedience experiment? As for Nina Simone … well what does one need to say about Nina Simone? She’s just awesome.

I haven’t become any smarter; at best, I’ve become street-smarter. Being street-smart is important in the practical business of getting on, earning a living and not pissing people off, but has nothing to do with the transformative epiphanic experiences that we associate with ‘coming-of-age’. My life is like an anti-coming-of-age-novel. I’m in my thirties and as ignorant as ever. To some extent ‘The dubious salvation of Jack V’ is also an anti-coming-of-age novel. Jack is selfish, he screws up and shit happens, but I don’t believe that it will have a profound effect on what he does in the future. In this sense Jack is a lot like me.

However it would make me uncomfortable if anyone did think the book was strictly autobiographical, mainly because Jack does such a shitty thing. I hope it’s something the reader can’t quite forgive him for. Of course I have borrowed a great deal from my own childhood. I don’t think there is a better source of material than one’s own experiences –  recycled, fictionalised, heightened and finally held together by the sort of strong narrative arc that one never finds in everyday life. If ever I had something that was close to an epiphanic experience it was when I realised that I could use something that had happened to me and then exaggerate and embroider and lie, like you do at a dinner party after a few glasses of wine, but without your girlfriend or boyfriend or spouse ruining a great story with the truth. The truth isn’t snappy and the truth is rarely as much fun.

But the question of autobiography is far more complicated than dinner party anecdotes, which over the years bear little resemblance to the original events that were their genesis.  To speak with confidence about autobiography, as if the genre were easily defined, is to speak as if the epistemological debates in the university had long been settled. What is truth? What is knowledge? That thing we trust above all else today, the guarantor of truth, is the video camera, which records, we believe, what actually happened. But even the video camera performs a necessary interpretive violence through framing. There is never a context wholly sufficient to make truth, that difficult world, fully present.

What then of our own memories? Some years ago my sister told me about a chance encounter with an Israeli soldier at a Starbucks café in Auckland. Three years later I said to her, ‘Remember that time we met that Israeli soldier?’

‘We?’ she said. ‘It was just me. You weren’t there.’

‘I was,’ I protested. ‘I remember!’ But I wasn’t. I had fabricated a memory. My sister, I should add, has a vivid way of telling stories and so this clear picture had become lodged in my brain and misfiled as a memory in which I was present. This is why I would be extremely cautious about ever writing anything called an ‘autobiography’ and why we would do well to give Roth a break when we insist on knowing who the hell this Zuckerman chap really is. That demand is based on the assumption that the author could even tell us who this Roth chap really is. The question ‘What is autobiography’ is as complicated and unanswerable as the question, ‘What is literature?’ It is sufficiently difficult that one should proceed with caution when reading something the author calls  ‘autobiography’, let alone something the author calls ‘a novel’.

Having said all that, it’s no bad thing if a book reads like autobiography; in fact I can think of no higher compliment for a book written in the first person. It means you have made the world and the characters so real, so credible that the reader can only conclude that it must be based on true events.  In that sense, everything one writes should feel like ‘thinly veiled autobiography’ even if every last detail, is completely fictional.