On Writing · 11 February 2026 · 5 min read
On writing close to the subject
Notes on proximity, loyalty and the problem of writing about people who were kind to you.
Distance is supposed to be the writer's protection. You stand back, you see the shape, you are not implicated. I have not had that luxury and, increasingly, I do not think I want it.
Proximity is a form of evidence. It is also a debt. When you write about people who fed you, who trusted you with a difficult hour, the temptation is to protect them into blandness — to produce a portrait so careful it says nothing.
The rule I settled on: do not write anything to settle a score, and do not withhold anything only because it is uncomfortable for me. If a scene survives both tests, it belongs on the page.
The harder discipline is tense. Memoir written in the present tense flatters the writer with a false immediacy. Written in the past, it admits what it is — reconstruction, done in good faith, by someone who was there and is no longer.
I have kept the reconstruction visible. Where I am unsure, the sentence says so. That is not weakness in the prose. It is the only thing that makes the certain sentences worth anything.
Thato Sebastian-Charles Mmereki is the author of What Light Cannot Touch, a strategic executive and sovereign venture capitalist working across Africa and global markets.
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