Why does the idea feel so gross to me – and is it a sign I shouldn’t do it?

Want Hera’s help? Email your problem to helpme@thespinoff.co.nz or fill out this form.

Help me Hera,

I am thinking of/ have started writing a book based on my life and the lives of people I was around, and it feels yucckkyy but I’m like people do this all the time, wtf? Am I being afraid of people being mad at me, even though I would change names/obfuscate the truth/is this the people-pleaser vibes rearing their head, or is this my intuition that it’s a bit fucked to use people’s lives like this??

I can’t decide if it’s right to push through (I would be doing this project for my master’s) or if this is a sign that it’s not right/not the right time.

Best, 

Autobiographer

Dear Autobiographer,

Is it unethical to write about other people? Maybe. When you get right down to it, it’s probably unethical to live at all, and yet here we are crawling over the face of the world, like a virulent species of invasive carpenter ant, haunted by language. For all the collective harm we do, being able to share our experience of being alive on this planet is surely one of the mildest forms of psychic damage we inflict upon one another.

Is it fucked to use people’s lives like this? Like most ethical dilemmas, the boring answer is “it depends.” But there is no single piece of writing, autobiographical or otherwise, that doesn’t, in some way, hinge upon our relationship to others. If your book is exploitative, then so is Middlemarch, which, maybe from some niche philosophical standpoint, is true, but as a species, we are professional chroniclers living in a time of mass surveillance. Almost everything is a recording. Photographs and blog posts about optimising SEO, and eulogies, wedding speeches, and fantasy novels teeming with dragons. They are not all of the same equivalence, but if the devil is truly in the details, then all we’re doing is haggling over the execution.

The truth is we’re all inextricably bound up in each other’s lives, unable to hide from our own reflection, whether that reflection comes in the form of tell-all memoirs, gossip, operas, anonymous tweets or one-star restaurant reviews. Perhaps it’s a little ethically iffy to enshrine our most scathing reminiscences in handsome hardcover editions, available at all good bookshops, but on the other hand, if you don’t have the right to speak honestly about your own life, what’s the point?

Is it mean to write a memoir about your father, who was a charismatic bank robber? Who cares. Perhaps he should have thought about that before he decided to charismatically rob banks. Hurting someone’s feelings isn’t the same as behaving unethically, and sometimes it’s the author’s prerogative not to care. In many circumstances, not giving a shit is a valid ethical standpoint.

Having said that, it’s easy to anticipate that people’s reaction to being written about is negative by default, but that’s not always the case. It’s entirely possible to write a memoir that celebrates and honours the people in your life, and gives people that same giddy thrill they felt as a child seeing their own address in the telephone book. Perhaps this is authorial cope, but I can think of many instances of autobiographical writing where the author’s rendering of their subject is an unequivocal and painstaking act of love and generosity, like Sarah Perry’s Death of an Ordinary Man, or Patricia Lockwood’s gorgeous rendering of her charmingly batshit mother. Obviously, it’s up to people to decide how they feel about their own portrayal. But just as it’s possible to risk pissing people off, it’s equally possible to flatter and honour them. Writing can be an act of generosity and love, just as much as it can be a diabolical act of vengeful, interpersonal sabotage.

The real answer is it depends on what you are planning to say about people, how you are planning to say it, and how much you care what they think.

The first thing I would remind you of is that writing and publishing are not the same thing. There is nothing unethical about the act of writing. It only becomes a problem when you get around to the publishing side of things. Which means you have plenty of time to experiment before making up your mind.

It may feel like a complete waste of time to write something if you’re not sure about publishing it. But sometimes you have to write the thing first, to know what you need to be worried about.

The best reason not to write something is if your heart isn’t completely in it, or you’re not excited by the idea. If I were you, I would be asking: “is this where my mental energy is/is this the most rich/interesting subject matter at my disposal, which I can’t wait to spend the next 3-5 years of my life on?” Because if not it’s a waste of time, and if it is, then you should do it and throw your whole heart behind it, and trust you’ll have the intelligence and creativity to figure out what, if necessary, to leave out, and how best to handle any difficult truths.

If you do decide to keep going, I think you have to summon a little cognitive dissonance, so you can write as if you and everyone you love is dead. Later, you can hand it off to your editor (who is also you, but wearing funky glasses), but your job right now is to go full ham. 100% free range NZ honey cured pork. You can’t run from the cops with a sack of stolen jewels if you’re constantly glancing over your shoulder the whole time. You need to run as hard and fast as you can.

Once you have written the thing, there’s plenty of time to panic about the consequences. But there are also plenty of creative ways of dealing with overly personal reminiscences. Here are some ideas:

You could redact entire sections of your book, like the Pentagon Papers (or Jenny Boully’s The Body, which redacts the memoir portion of the memoir, and leaves only the footnotes)

You can write “this part is too personal, so I have substituted it for a picture of a whelk.”

You could fictionalise it and set it in an aquarium outlet store.

You can rename everyone involved, even yourself, by publishing it under a pseudonym.

You can show it to the people you care most about upsetting, and ask for their blessing/feedback before publication.

You can choose not to publish any part of it you like, and keep the full manuscript in a sealed envelope until you and everyone you know is dead.

You can make peace with the knowledge that some people are going to be mad no matter what, and if they like, they can write their own elliptical and maddeningly beautiful work of creative nonfiction as a fierce rebuttal to your elliptical and maddeningly beautiful work of nonfiction.

Besides, the things you think people are going to be mad about are never the things they will actually be mad about. What they will actually get mad at is something minor you hadn’t even anticipated they would care about, or something that wasn’t even about them in the first place. I know this is not exactly comforting, but it’s a truism of nonfiction writing for a reason. You can anticipate legitimate grievances till the cows come home, but it’s impossible to predict what will actually annoy someone.

There is probably no such thing as publishing a memoir that will hurt nobody’s feelings. But there’s no point in treating writing as some literary manifestation of the trolley problem. You have a right to tell the story of your own life, and I believe you will have the requisite creativity and empathy to figure out a way to responsibly edit the difficult parts to your own moral satisfaction. But you can’t edit something that hasn’t been written yet. Write it for yourself first, even if it never sees the light of day.