John Coetzee has reached a point in his career where whole conferences are dedicated to this single book of his. His life’s work is contained between the covers of a single novel, but it is enough. People will never stop talking about what he has achieved. Even if he never publishes another thing, which seems increasingly likely, his immortality is assured.

All the other writers whose books were featured in the journal were discussed in previous sessions. John Coetzee has a session to himself. None of the others has the weight, the heft, the gravitas of this man who made my assault the basis for his book.

I notice a flat-screen TV mounted on the wall next to us. It is tilted slightly to face the audience. If John Coetzee appears today, it will be on that screen. I glance at my watch. It is two in the afternoon. That means it is nine in the evening in Adelaide. What are the chances that he will appear there, broadcast from the other side of the world? What are the chances that I will be able to challenge him on his appropriation of my life for fictional purposes?

The session gets underway. The moderator invites us to introduce ourselves. The first panellist is a Coetzee scholar. That is how he describes himself. Like it’s a legitimate speciality. What did he do for the first four decades of his career, I wonder? He could hardly have been a “Coetzee scholar” before the book came out.

There is a sociologist who is conducting research on memoir as a site of healing. Then there is a literary theorist who writes about post-structuralism.

We start off with the three academics batting around some ideas about reality being a text, fiction being a text, and the relationship between the two being an intertextual conversation. It is, to put it mildly, an argument I have heard before. The literary theorist asks whether we can claim ownership over the events of our own life—the story of our life. Do we have any claim to understand that story better than anyone else, or even to tell it better?

A murmur of agreement ripples around the venue. The consensus seems to be that people have no special claim to the stories of their own lives. They don’t have sole rights to it, and they don’t have the power to withhold it from anyone else who wishes to tell it, modify it, exaggerate it, or change it completely.

“Then why does the law give us some measure of protection against those who tell falsehoods about our lives?” I ask.

“It’s a limited protection,” says the sociologist. “It applies only if you can prove that you have suffered harm as a direct consequence of the falsehood that has been told about you. Quantifiable, material harm.”