How do memoirists handle the fallout from telling our stories? When we let the reading public into our private lives, we also let them into the private lives of a lot of other people, who may or may not appreciate the scrutiny.
My publisher facilitates communication within cohorts - people whose books are coming out in the same season. We do zoom meetings on some regular basis and talk about our publishing journeys. One of the hottest topics has to do with privacy.
I was astounded to discover how many of this season’s memoir authors had a lawyer read their memoir to check for risk of a libel action, got releases signed, and made major changes to disguise the identities of persons in their stories. Others talked about disruptions in family relationships, when loved ones just did not want the book to be published, even if they weren’t in it.
Anne Lamott’s response to these dilemmas is:
You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better. - Bird by Bird
True, but you still might not want to invite those people back into your life by writing about them.
My own book comes with two disclaimers. The one on the copyright page was inserted by the publisher without input from me:
Names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of certain individuals.
When I saw that in the galleys, I had to think. Did I change names to protect anyone’s privacy? This is what I wrote about the matter:
Richie’s take on fish stories, by the way:
Any story worth telling is worth improving.
I thought that covered what needed to be said. But then, I am not a lawyer.
What you will find within the pages of A Gritty Little Tourist Town is mostly first names only. There is even a whole chapter about how we don’t know (and don’t ask) last names or stateside identities. [When in doubt, assume CIA.] Whoever needed concealment did the concealing on their own. The names I made up were for minor characters whose names I didn’t remember. The only secrets I told were about what happens inside my own head. I let people’s flaws show, but nobody got seriously trashed. It’s not that kind of memoir.
I chose to walk a similar line in my first book as well, Prozac Monologues. That one is a memoir about my struggles with misdiagnosed and erroneously treated mental illness. It has more jagged edges, but again, the edges were my own. I could have told horror stories about one of those docs. But—why even give her the space on the page?
So that’s the kind of memoirist I am. I don’t do trauma porn, and that limits the number of landmines in the manuscripts. I try to be honest but respectful. Funny whenever possible, but mostly at my own expense. No lawyering up necessary.
As an author, how do you handle these issues? As a reader, what are you looking for in a memoir?
The photo by Marixa Namir Andrade is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.