Between a Monster and a Saint

On Writing About Other People

Every time I talk with a group of writers about my memoir, I get the same question: “How do you handle writing about other people?”

The simple answer? In the past, I handled it horribly, and I hope I’m better now.

First, a confession: as a young writer, I didn’t think very deeply about the ethics of writing about other people — and I often wrote about other people in a way that was not particularly nice. I spilled every injury onto the page and I wasn’t always careful about identifying details. If you’d asked me about it then, I would’ve given a long, complicated, and largely ingenuous answer placing my writing in the context of Confessionalism and New Confessionalism.

The truth was much uglier than that.

I wrote most often about situations in which I felt like I was the victim. It’s a writer’s duty, after all, to tell the truth, and so I put the story – as I saw it – on the page. A lot of the time, that didn’t involve a great deal of introspection, especially in terms of the responsibility I might have for what happened. I was just, I reassured myself, doing what a writer should do. I was telling my truth – but I didn’t always take into consideration that the people I wrote about also had truths that were every bit as valid as mine.

When a close friend (rightfully) called me out after I read a series of not-so-nice poems about an ex, I felt like a monster — and I needed to. I needed that kind of shock to the system to truly reevaluate what I was doing and to face the fact that the people I put on the page were, in fact, people off of the page.

Looking back, that was, shamefully, part of the problem: I didn’t fully take into consideration that the people I wrote about were people, flawed and beautiful and terrible and wonderful whole people, and that I was, too. Another part of the problem? Fear. Once I decided to change the way I wrote, I was terrified. I dreaded the empty page because I feared I’d have nothing with which to fill it (I was wrong: once I widened the scope of my writing, a whole universe of somethings appeared on the page, and my work – and my soul – was better for it).

However, there is a reason that “tell your truth” is a universal maxim in creative writing courses. Our lives are inextricably intertwined with the lives of other people, and if you tell the truth of your life, those other people are going to end up on the page at some point and in some form —  especially if you, like me, are a memoirist. So how do you write about other people, and in a way that’s authentic to your story and cognizant of their concerns?

That’s the problem I faced with my memoir, The Tiger and the Cage.

The first thing I did when it sold was a ridiculous dance in my kitchen. The second thing I did was panic.

It was a memoir about my medical history and the way that illness wrecked my life, my friendships, my loves. There was no way for me to write that story – a story I believed it very necessary to tell, a story that felt so necessary that its telling came fast and fevered, almost as if the story were letting itself out – without writing about other people. I knew that, but that didn’t make it any less terrifying. I was terrified that I hadn’t handled other people’s parts in my story – and their own stories, and how those fit together – as responsibly and empathetically as I should have. I was terrified that people would hate me for writing about them. But I also knew that the truth of the memoir, the warp and weft of the thing that felt so necessary, would fall apart if I cut others out of it.

So what did I do? I focused a round of revision entirely on the way I wrote about others. I asked myself the questions I wished I’d asked myself when I was younger: is this necessary to the book? How would I feel if someone wrote about me like this? Am I taking responsibility for my part in things? Am I being fair? Am I telling the whole story? Am I protecting this person as much as I can? I made the changes I needed to make, and then I let the panic go, remembering that I couldn’t control how other people reacted and realizing that I could and would take full responsibility for what I’d put on the page.

My answer to this question is messy, I realize, but so is the process of writing about other people.

In “Rumple. Stilt. And Skin.”, an essay in her stunning collection, Happily, Sabrina Orah Mark beautifully addresses this topic. “Lately I have been hurting people I love with my writing,” she writes. A friend whose name she used in an unrelated story tells her “‘I need to protect myself as a human being,’” and Mark realizes “I wasn’t the healer’s chest […] as I had always hoped to be.” Nor did Mark intend to hurt anyone — the story wasn’t even about her friend. The truth is that in order to write truthfully, you can’t be a monster or a saint. There are going to be circumstances in which you have to write about people, and sometimes, even if you’re as respectful and careful and protective as humanly possible, people are going to get angry — and that’s their right. They’re people, not characters, after all. As a writer, you must be, as Sabrina Orah Mark writes, “[a]n asylum and a danger. A rattle and a lullaby.” You must navigate the page in a way that tells the truth but – and these are two cliches, I know, but they’re true – allows you to sleep at night and look at yourself in the mirror in the morning — and you must find a way to be at peace with that.