The Ethics of Writing Essays About Real People

What do we owe the people we write about?

In 2006, less than a year after earning an MFA in fiction, I found myself staring at my laptop screen, uninspired by the various short story drafts I had started. I felt called instead to write in a genre that my education hadn’t covered: memoir. Though I’d just spent two years (and thousands of dollars on tuition) inventing characters and situations—or disguising my true stories—I wanted to make art not from invention but from distillation, to mine my memory for details and refract them through the lens of my inner eye.

Because I’d never had instruction or mentorship in creative nonfiction, when it came to navigating the ethics of writing (and publishing) about other people, the only advice I had to guide me was this pithy quote by Anne Lamott from her classic handbook, Bird by Bird. Lamott offers, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should've behaved better.”

At the time, it felt like the only advice I needed. Permission to tell my own truth was an important starting point, and I understand why this quote is so widely shared. When many of us begin writing, we fear the taboos we may break and the secrets we might uncover. We have, in spite of this fear, the right to speak our truths. In fact, for many of us, the allure of writing is that it allows us to reclaim autonomy, to center ourselves in a world that has too often treated us as peripheral.

But the limitations of Lamott’s advice are embedded in her phrase “they should have behaved better.” The quote infers that the writer has free rein to explore the ways they’ve been wronged. But what about when the dynamic you’re exploring is not that straightforward? What about when your story is tied not to someone’s cruelty, but to their vulnerability?