How to Write about Real People in Memoir

A guide to navigating sensitive truths in your creative non-fiction with Lilly Dancyger

Art by Mariam Chagelishvili

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Heya, welcome to The Forever Workshop. First time? Read this. Back again? Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

A workshop for:

Memoir writers who want to write truthfully about their experiences but are worried how people in their life might react

Your instructor:

Lilly Dancyger — essayist and author of the memoir Negative Space and essay collection First Love, which was a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist.

Takeaways:

• Common concerns for memoir writers during writing and revision

• Important questions to ask when writing about sensitive topics in non-fiction

• How to navigate telling your truth with fairness and nuance

• Advice on representing real people in a multidimensional way within memoir

Today’s workshop is free for all subscribers. By the end of it, you’ll know what to consider as you write and revise your creative non-fiction, and feel more confident about approaching difficult subjects in memoir.

Subscribe to get a workshop from us every Wednesday

How to Write About Real People in Memoir

The fact that the characters in our stories are real people (some of whom might actually read what we write!) is one of the most challenging aspects of writing memoir. The fear of getting it wrong—of representing people in our lives unfairly, or of representing them perfectly fairly but still pissing them off in the process—is enough to keep tons of would-be memoirists from writing a word; and enough to keep those brave enough to write anyway up at night.

Through the process of publishing two very personal books of nonfiction (and writing a third, which will be out next year), I’ve learned something that has made this minefield a little easier to navigate: the challenges of writing about real people fall into two distinct categories—writing problems, and publishing problems—and keeping them separate can make them much easier to manage. Letting these very different concerns get tangled up in your mind is a surefire way to get overwhelmed and stuck: worrying about publishing problems before you’ve even begun writing, editing yourself for public reception when you should be focused on craft and getting to a version of the story that feels true to your own experience.

Determining whether a story is yours to tell or if you’re veering too far into other people’s privacy, making sure the story is true and fair and that every character (even those who have harmed you) comes across as a multidimensional human instead of a stock villain, implicating yourself in descriptions of conflict as much as you implicate others—these are all writing problems.

How people in your life will react to what you’ve written is a publishing problem.

Like most big challenges, in writing as in life, this jumble of writing and publishing concerns becomes much easier to manage when you break it down into smaller challenges to deal with one at a time, in order.

Here’s a loose breakdown of when in the process to ask yourself these big questions:

Before you start writing:

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Whose story is this to tell? (writing question)

When you first have an idea of what you want to write about, it’s always good to start with a gut check on whether the story is yours to tell in the first place. Memoir inevitably includes other people—pretty much every experience we write about is a shared experience in some way. But where’s the line between what’s yours and what’s theirs?

I think of it like this:

• Anything that happened primarily to me is fair game to write about, even if other people were involved.

• Anything that was an equally shared experience is also fair game, but might require a little more tact in making sure I’m representing only my perspective and not speaking for anyone else.

• And anything that primarily happened to someone else and impacted me in a second-hand way requires the full informed and freely-given consent of that someone else.

This is the loose rubric I start with, at least. There are exceptions that have to do with power dynamics—for example, children and my students get more protection and anonymity than my peers. (There’s a whole long-ranging debate with various strongly-held beliefs about whether it’s ever ok for parents to write about their children. Like pretty much every writing “rule,” I tend to think there’s no one size fits all right answer, but that the power dynamic should absolutely be taken into account, and writing about children and anyone else the writer has any kind of power over requires even more care than writing about people with whom they’re on a level playing field.)

While writing & revising:

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Am I representing everyone as accurately as possible? (writing questions)

While writing (and revising), ask yourself:

• Have I portrayed everyone in this story as a multidimensional human being rather than a stock character or villain?

• Have I implicated myself in conflicts rather than putting all the blame on others?

• Have I represented the people in this story in a way that feels fair and complete and true from my perspective?

These are all difficult questions to answer and difficult things to achieve in writing, but they’re much easier—or at least, they’re possible—when you think of them as craft questions, completely separate from how the people you’re writing about will react to the finished work.

To the best of your ability, work through these questions without thinking at all about how your writing will be received. Try to write as if nobody will ever read what you’re writing! (This is easier to do if you can reassure yourself that the time will come to address concerns about how people will react; it’s just that now, while writing, is not that time.)

These are also things to ask for feedback on from other writers who don’t know the people you’ve written about—people who can judge the complexity and vividness of your characters as characters.

Later in revision:

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How would it feel to read this as one of the people in the story? (revision question, starting to prepare for publication)

Only after you’ve written the story to your satisfaction, gotten it to a point where it feels true and conveys what you want it to convey, is it time to start thinking about how it might be received by the people you’ve written about.

For me, this is a revision step all its own: a full read through of the manuscript where I finally acknowledge to myself that some or all of the people I’ve written about will eventually read what I’ve written. And after blocking it out of my mind during the whole writing process up until this point, I let myself consider how it might come across to them.

During the read-through itself, I generally just mark every line or passage or section that I want to take a closer look at—basically every spot where I describe another person, or their actions, or our relationship. Then I go back through and make decisions about what I might want to omit or soften out of consideration for their feelings.

Importantly, by this point in the process, I’m generally pretty confident that I’ve done my due diligence to write a fair and true story, so I’m not as timid as I might have been if I’d done this step earlier in the process. But still, sometimes a description is harsher than it needs to be, or sometimes in the interest of making a character feel well-rounded I’ve included details about their life or experience that aren’t really mine to share.

This is the stage at which I make decisions about what’s really necessary to the story, and what I’d feel ok with letting go for the sake of people’s feelings and my ongoing relationships with them

Before publication:

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Should I share what I’ve written with anyone represented in my story before it’s published, while there’s still time to make changes? (publishing question)

This is a question that comes up all the time—whether or not, and when, to share drafts with people in your life. When, I think, is the easier question to answer: Only when it’s close to final, polished and revised, so you’re sharing the most complete and considered version.

But that only applies if you’ve decided to share a draft at all. That has less of a clear answer, and really depends on each individual relationship.

Personally, I tend to err on the side of sharing drafts with more people than not. If people are going to read the work eventually, I’d rather deal with their potential reactions early, rather than letting them be another thing to worry about in the already anxiety-laden publication process. And, I’ve learned, making small changes is often a small price to pay to maintain a relationship.

I also learned from publishing my first book, Negative Space, that you can never predict what details will upset someone, and that often they’ll be small things that wouldn’t be that big of a deal to change. Of all the fraught and difficult things I wrote in that book about my mother, her relationship with my father and their shared heroin addiction, and my complicated relationship with her, the detail she brought up that had particularly upset her was that I described my loft bed in the studio apartment we shared when I was a teenager as being “above the kitchen.” It was next to the kitchen, she insisted; I made it sound worse than it was. When I looked down from that loft bed, I looked down into the kitchen, yes, but I also had a desk and clothing rack in the space directly under it. From my perspective, either above or next to would suffice. It would not have been a big deal for me to make that change, but it would have made a big difference to her.

But I didn’t share a draft of the book with my mother before it was published, so by the time she read it and objected to that word choice, it was too late.

I carried that experience with me into the publication process for my second book, First Love, sharing drafts with just about everyone I wrote about—including an ex-friend I hadn’t spoken to in years.

Just because I shared drafts with everyone, doesn’t mean that everyone’s opinion got equal weight. An important thing to remember is that sharing a draft doesn’t mean you have to change everything someone wants you to. At this stage, you have to balance your relationship with the person against the story you want to tell. For some friends, I would have cut entire essays if they asked me to, because no essay was more important than those relationships. (They didn’t ask me to cut any full essays, but a few did ask for very small changes, on the level of “above” vs. “next to” that I was more than happy to make.) For others, I was sharing the drafts more to get their reactions out of the way before publication. In those cases, there were some changes I declined to make.

But the choices about which changes to make and which to decline were so, so much easier to make at this stage—once the book was written and revised and I’d wrestled with my own craft and ethical concerns first, without anyone looking over my shoulder. Once they were separated into a stage of the publishing process, rather than something I let get in my way while I was writing, or god forbid, stop me from writing in the first place

Share your thoughts (and truths!)

How did you get on with the prompts above? Did they unlock anything new in your creative non-fiction? Tell us all about it!

More memoir & non-fiction resources:

For more on this topic, and to come up with your own ethical rubric and publication plan, join Lilly Dancyger on April 18 for a virtual session, Telling Shared Stories: Writing About Real People in Memoir.

(P.S. Forever Workshop readers get 15% off with discount code FOREVER)

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And for more guidance on writing memoir and personal essays, explore these masterclass to help you generate ideas, find your voice, and craft honest, authentic creative non-fiction:

An 8-part comprehensive guide to writing a personal essay from start to finish, including lessons on structure, point-of-view, and revising your work.

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A 4-part workshop on finding meaning in the ‘quiet’ moments of daily life — including how to write about difficult subjects with subtlety and nuance.

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