Writing about real people is probably the number one issue writers of personal stories worry about, whether it’s memoir, personal essay, or newspaper column.
Frank McCourt, for example, was not able to write his brilliant memoir Angela’s Ashes until his mother had passed away. He knew he would have to write about her affair with her cousin, and he couldn’t write about that as long as she was alive.
Waiting until those you want to write about are dead is one option, but if you don’t want to wait that long?
How do you navigate the treacherous waters of writing about others, especially if they are family?
First of all, you should write first, and worry later.
Why? Because you can never predict how people will react. For example, when Joe Mackall, author of The Last Street Before Cleveland gave the manuscript to his wife, he worried how she would react to his portrayal of her. Instead, she got upset at his statement that living in his boyhood neighborhood was the last time he had felt complete. Had he never felt complete living with her?
He hadn’t seen that one coming!
Nor did I when I shared an essay I had won a prize for with my mother, who got upset because she wasn’t in it. No amount of writerly explanation helped. I’ll share that essay in next week’s post.
This brings me to my next point:
Most people love being written about.
It’s the same phenomenon as receiving your child’s school newsletter: You immediately scan it to see if your child is featured. If not, you lose interest.
The first question my children ask, whenever they hear I’ve published something, is “Am I in it?”
All of us want to be acknowledged, recognized, and know that we matter.
Being written about is a great affirmation of our relevance.
Furthermore, reactions are often indicative of the relationship you have with the person you are writing about.
A solid relationship won’t fall apart because of your writing; in fact, your writing might deepen your understanding of each other.
On the other hand, a relationship that was rocky before you wrote about that person might blow apart.
Mark Doty’s father reportedly didn’t speak to him again after Mark sent his father the manuscript of his memoir Firebird. Sadly, even though their relationship had been precarious up until then, they had just gone through a rapprochement that Firebird apparently destroyed (see Doty’s article in The Writer’s Chronicle, Oct/Nov 2005).
So ask yourself: What are you willing to risk?
“People’s lives are more important than my words.”
That’s Judith Barrington’s attitude in Writing the Memoir, which is, in my opinion, the best book on how to write a memoir in my opinion. I agree with her.
Teresa Jordan, author of Riding the White Horse Home: A Western Family Album, warns: “Writers are users. We use the stories around us. I feel that carries a huge responsibility.” How then does a writer honor this responsibility?
Fictionalizing a true story is not necessarily a good way to avoid this responsibility.
In an interview with The Writer’s Chronicle (Summer 2005) Susan Cheever, daughter of John Cheever, relates the following:
“My father wrote the story called ‘The Hartleys’ in which a little girl – who's obviously me – goes on a family ski trip – which is in every detail the ski trip we took. The little girl gets killed in the ski tow. That, for me, was far more traumatic than if he'd written a nonfiction piece about that ski trip in which he talked about his fears for the little girl. To me, the fiction is much more dangerous, much more painful for the people who it may be based on, than nonfiction. In nonfiction, at least the writer has some obligation to tell what really happened. […] So, in my family, being fictionalized has been ten million times more painful. That's why, when a student says to me, ‘If I did this as fiction it wouldn't hurt the people so much,’ I say to them, ‘You are wrong. It will hurt them more. Because you as a fiction writer have more power.’”
If you feel you’re treading on thin ice, ask yourself, “Which decision is more life enhancing?”
Be selective. Telling all or not telling anything is not the only option.
Often the way you shape a story allows you to leave out complicated stuff.
For example, by focusing on small moments between her dying son and herself, a student of mine has been able to write her memoir as a series of essays that don’t get bogged down by the larger family story.
When writing about others, the main challenge is to see and portray real people as multi-faceted characters.
This can be especially hard if you are writing about a family member who has a defined role in your life. That person is your father, your mother, your brother. But who is she/he apart from that? What challenges was she/he facing? What motivated him or her? The process of flipping your point-of-view to see a family member as a character in a story can be one of the most rewarding and illuminating by-products of writing memoir.
Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that we all have our own perspective and can only tell our version of the truth. As Michael Steinberg, author of Still Pitching, once explained to his mother, “I’m writing about my grandfather, not your father.”
As you write about others, don’t show your work to those involved until you have arrived at a final version you can stand behind.
If you showed your father a draft and later deleted a passage he really liked, he’d be disappointed. Likewise, it’s not worth possibly upsetting someone with something you’re not sure you’re going to put out there. Share your work only when you, as the writer, have arrived at your version of the story.
Offer to make changes, but reserve the right to tell your story.
Writing is also a collaborative effort, and family members can be great fact checkers.
At the very least, they need to know that they are being written about. Ideally, they need to be comfortable with your portrayal of them. You can, of course, change names to shield their identity, but chances are they will recognize themselves, so always take the high road and involve every main character who’s involved in signing off on the manuscript.
I never publish anything, in which one of my family members is a main character, without showing it to them first and getting their approval.
The important people in your life should not be blindsided.
I also have the rule that I don’t ever mention my children’s names, nor my brother’s and sister’s in my writing. When they get Googled, people shouldn’t land on my story about them, at least not on the first digging around.
My husband, on the other hand, is a main character in my memoir Jumping Over Shadows, so his name is out there. While he’s not super comfortable with that, he understands it was necessary for the story to work, and he’s made his peace with that.
In the end, it’s your story, and you can’t satisfy everyone. But you can make sure to be satisfied yourself. So at least be behind your own work 100 percent.
This essay is an excerpt from my book How to Write Compelling Stories from Family History, and an earlier version appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books, October 3, 2013.
For all of you interested in hands-on practice, I have an online workshop coming up in March (via the Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio):
I think that point you make in the Cheever example, "Because you as a fiction writer have more power" is deeply significant. We tiptoe around the truth by making this false assumption that a story carries less weight than the nonfiction/memoir version and you are so right, that is just not the case.
My last book ended up being described as "a deeply autobiographical work of fiction" which is a sentence you can drive a truck though, it is a flimsy statement, and this point of yours really drives that home. When my father read it, he simply called me "Killer" in his feedback to me. I did not show any of it to him first, and the book details him at various points in his life, from when I was a kid to when I was a young man. Fictionalizing those all-too-real events felt like I was making them safe, but the "truth" in the form of thinly veiled autobiography may indeed be more difficult to digest, accept or forgive, depending on who you write about.
I did write something about my brother, specifically a pivotal and disastrous part of his life. In that case, I gave him the book to read after it was fully edited. I told him if he had any issue at all with the story about him, it would be deleted without hesitation. The guy went through his own personal hell when he was 18, and I tried to get it all down, what it was like to be his brother in that messy, messy time. He read it carefully, took his time getting back to me, and simply said "it's good, thanks for asking, leave it all in."
"Write first, worry later." Yes!