To write about someone else means both to expose and transform them. This is the dilemma of writing that Janet Malcolm describes as “morally indefensible.” In
Doing Time: Essays on Using People
, Kristian Vistrup Madsen deliberates on his correspondence with an inmate in a California prison named Michael. Over several years, this spawns a series of reflections about the politics of solidarity and appropriation, but also about writing itself and what happens when life is turned into art. This book is a portrait of a friendship interpolated by great difference, and of a fearful time in which experience and identity are everything, and thinking not enough.