What to Write and What Not To

Knowing When to Stay Silent and When to Go Big When Writing About Real People in Memoir or Autobiographical Fiction

Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash

I don’t pretend to be an expert on this. I don’t think there are always easy binary answers. It often depends on the nature of the content and the potential harm to self and other which might possibly arise as a result of writing some specific thing.

When it comes to personal writing, I’m not necessarily the best one to comment. As most of you who subscribe to my stack know: I write largely—but not entirely—from an autobiographical point of view. And I write as authentically as I can. This is a good thing, for the most part, in my opinion, in terms of cutting things down to the bone, so to speak. There’s very little “fluff” or “flowery prose” here; I’m trying sincerely to communicate, to be clear, and to tell the/my Truth.

But what about other people? If I’m writing as honestly as I can, and I’m writing in a deep way personally, what about the other people I’m writing about?

Yes.

This brings up a thorny, typical issue for people who write autobiographical fiction and, especially, memoir. I write both. Sometimes my material is slightly even more blurry and I call it “fictional memoir.” Here’s the difference, in my personal view:

Autofiction: Using your real life experiences to one degree or another (large or small) to shape your prose; but you can alter these things however and whenever you please, to serve the story.

Memoir: Using your own life as material to tell a “true” story (to the best of your ability, seeing as memory is complex and slippery and we can often misremember things and recall dialogue and even major events inaccurately). With memoir the idea is to hew as close as humanly possible to “remembered reality.”

Fictional Memoir: Staying as close to memoir as you can, in other words clinging as tightly as possible in general to your “remembered reality,” but also, when necessary, altering small rhythms or scenes or truths in order to move the story forward and gain the larger “emotional truth.” Perhaps we can say that “fictional memoir” stands somewhere in the thin gap between auto-fiction and memoir.

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When writing either autobiographical fiction or memoir I always change the real names to fictionalized ones. Sometimes I’ll modify certain scenes in particular ways. Sometimes I’ll change the real-life location, usually simply shifting from the real city to a city nearby. But the truth is, anyone who’s been in my life in a meaningful way could read my work and find themselves there. It may not be an exact replica of them, but “they’re” there.

I’ve gotten myself into trouble a few times with my writing. For one, my mom, who is herself also a writer and has several books out, including her autobiographical novel (I’d call it “fictional memoir”) The Road at My Door, a brilliant book covering her life growing up in Southern California in the turbulent 1960s. (Her story is tragic, wild and inspiring.) Very often in my life—I guess I can say since the inception of my hunger to put prose on the page—I have written about my mom, or, more specifically, about my childhood feelings of emotional abandonment, and my struggles with her generally. A few times she’s expressed frustration over the way I’ve portrayed either her, my past, my father’s background, or other complex, at times shadowy elements of the family.

This is understandable. A very human response. I write about my mom from a child’s perspective—those unforgettable, tragic emotional wounds—fairly frequently still, but much less than I used to. It has no basis in resentment, at this point it’s almost a habitual, automatic emotional prompt for my writing; a place for me to start or enter through. We’ve had arguments and disagreements over the years about this. Ironically, her own father—my grandpa—who died in 2015 finally read her autobiographical book and, when he asked if it was all true, and she said yes, he wept. I know my mom sees both sides of the equation. It’s hard to be the one written about. And to her credit, I’ve never been on the other side of that literary ledger.

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Recently I had a more complicated scenario come up. When I was living in Manhattan, in 2019, I met and fell for a woman 12 years my senior. We met in a 12-step group. We’ll call her Gloria (not her real name). We dated for a while on and off. It was a complex, and often rather confusing, experience. She thought I was too young; I didn’t; she seemed both genuinely interested and yet trying to push me away. In some ways I think I pushed her away, too, and yet also pulled her towards me. Our little song-and-dance thing—whatever it was—ended a little before the Pandemic hit in March, 2020.

Anyway, I ended up writing a fictional memoir about my 2.3 years in New York City called Two Years in New York, which you can read here. (First 5 chapters = free.)

Gloria knew I was writing a book about my experience living in New York, including being in East Harlem (125^th and 5^th Ave) during the opening months of the Covid lockdowns. She also knew she herself was a main “character” in it. She was an artist and a very fascinating, intelligent person. For me she embodied a really romantic notion of what being a “New Yorker” meant, especially for a writer like me who lives too often inside his own head. She more or less made her living off her art, which was brilliant. She’d won several awards. She had a degree in Art. She ran in the Manhattan art social circles.

I knew I’d write about her, and I told her that frequently when we spent time.

I wouldn’t by any means say I “used her,” but I would say that, as a writer, as a sort of wannabe objective observer and social anthropologist, I “used her” for material. To be fair, I use everything and just about everyone for material, myself most of all. And I am not always kind towards myself in my writing; I strive to be honest and use as much self-awareness as feasible when penning prose about my problematic persona. But it’s not like I went out of my way to date a woman of a certain type to then gather notes and write about it. It was all random and unconscious; it just happened. Organically.

Anyway, June of 2021 I decided to leave NYC and my shotgun apartment in Lenox Hill on East 70^th between First and York (I’d thankfully fled Harlem) and spend the summer in California, between my folks’ new house in Santa Barbara and my second/old home in the Bay Area.

But when I came home, after only a month, my father was diagnosed with terminal Melanoma. For more on that read here.