A few years ago I was diagnosed with a serious intermittent mental illness, and I made a decision not to rush to publicise it. I used that experience to write a journal article, about the queer politics of disclosure of disability, which carefully avoids saying what the diagnosis was. At a personal level, I have always had mixed feelings about ‘coming out’—even though it can be politically powerful to do so, it can also mean giving into the demand to narrate how you differ from the norm. With the possible exception of young men at dance and drama schools, nobody has ever had to ‘come out’ as straight; white Australians are not routinely asked to tell their migration stories; abled people are not required to explain how they are socially enabled, et cetera.

But when you’re a writer and you don’t write about an experience that marks a major inflection in your life narrative, you can’t write about experiences that flow from it … and more and more of your story is untold and untellable. This can happen because you want to avoid sharing private experiences, as I’ve just described, or because you know telling that part of your story is going to wound or potentially expose other people who were involved or will find out about it. I’ve had phone calls from relatives demanding line edits to ensure my writing reflects their own self-serving accounts of shared experiences. Even when you hold back to avoid hurting people, you’re making parts of your own story untellable, creating inflexible scar tissue in your life narrative.