Deciding What Belongs to You to Tell
Launch library · evergreen read
A memoirist's life inevitably overlaps with the lives of other people who did not necessarily agree to appear on the page at all. Deciding where personal storytelling ends and another person's private history begins is one of the genuinely difficult ethical questions the form raises, without any single reliable rule to resolve it cleanly.
Some writers err towards caution, changing details or omitting scenes that belong more to someone else's story than their own life. Others argue instead that a memoirist's own experience of an event, however entangled with other people, remains legitimately theirs to describe in whatever way they see fit.
There is no universally correct answer to this dilemma, only a series of individual judgement calls, made scene by scene throughout the drafting process. Writers weigh honesty against harm, and usually revisit that balance more than once during the long process of drafting and revising a full manuscript.