One sleepy week last July, months before Lionel Shriver strode onstage in Brisbane with her sombrero and her fury about cultural appropriation, Slate published a striking interview with Jonathan Franzen, who spoke with surprising candor—as far as I know, for the first time—about why he doesn’t write about African American characters. “I have thought about it,” Franzen said,



But… I don’t have very many black friends. I have never been in love with a black woman. I write about characters, and I have to love the character to write about the character. If you have not had direct firsthand experience of loving a category of person—a person of a different race, a profoundly religious person—I think it is very hard to dare, or necessarily even want, to write fully from the inside of a person.

When I read about Shriver’s speech—so incendiary and yet so reflexive, it could have been titled “I’m Insulted That You’re Insulted”—I immediately thought of Franzen’s words. These arguments, if we can call them arguments, seem to proceed from diametrically opposed positions—Shriver claims her imaginative freedom to use any kind of cultural material, while Franzen limits the range of his imagination to the small circle of people he has personally loved—yet both provoked strong disagreement, even outrage, from at least some of the same people. Including me.

It would be easy for a white writer—say, a young white writer, in an MFA program, working on his or her first novel—to look at these responses and feel caught in an imaginative bind, something that white writers have been articulating in one way or another for decades, going back at least as far as Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro” and William Styron’s impassioned defense of his widely critiqued novel The Confessions of Nat Turner. If I limit myself to white characters, I hear this young writer saying—in fact, I have heard writers say these very words—I get criticized for creating an all-white fictional universe; but if I try to write characters of color, characters different from myself, I get accused of “appropriation” and “theft.” The subtext of these arguments, this young writer goes on to say, is that white writers should just stop writing.

I often find myself on the receiving end of these comments because I’m white, and because two years ago I published a novel, Your Face in Mine, about the most radical kind of cultural appropriation: Plastic surgery which changes racial appearance, what characters in the book call “racial reassignment surgery.” One of the main characters, Martin, is a young, white, Jewish man who undergoes surgery to “become” African American; when we meet him at the beginning of the book, he’s been living as a black man in Baltimore, undiscovered, for a decade.

What possessed me to write such a book? Since high school, I’d known people, some of them intimate friends, who wanted to desperately escape their own whiteness. I felt that the longing to escape our own racial bodies was everywhere, from silly acts of what Shriver calls “trying on other people’s hats,” to identity-switching and disguise, and finally to radical plastic surgery. But this desire was found almost nowhere in contemporary fiction. I knew it would be risky—“don’t write that book,” my agent at the time told me, “you don’t want that kind of trouble”—but I thought there was a way I could do it. I’d build the novel out of a series of charged, ongoing arguments, in which no one voice “wins,” focusing on where our racial desires and fascinations come from: sadness, incompleteness, the inarticulate places where our most unacceptable urges begin. But I also wanted Your Face in Mine to be at least a little bit funny, to acknowledge the inherent awkwardness of a white writer arriving late (as we always seem to) to a conversation about race. As I wrote in an essay published at the time, I wanted to make use of “the tension, the friction, the rich possibilities of embarrassing oneself for a good cause.”