‘Invading other people’s privacy’: The memoirist’s dilemma

East Bay writer Kirsten Mickelwait had to wait until her ex-husband was dead to feel comfortable writing “The Ghost Marriage,” her memoir about surviving their catastrophic, 22-year marriage.

Writing a memoir can be grueling enough, as an author excavates painful memories and exposes secrets, character flaws or regrettable choices. It’s another thing when those secrets belong to the other people involved in your story. Writing about other people goes with memoir territory, of course, but for authors, it can raise a host of concerns that range from relationship betrayal to potential lawsuits.

San Jose-reared Stephanie Foo, a former producer for the “This American Life” podcast, said one benefit of being painfully estranged from her parents is that she didn’t have to fear their reactions when she wrote about their abuse and abandonment in “What My Bones Knew,” her chronicle about learning to heal from complex PTSD.

Estrangement was an issue, too, for East Bay writer Julia Scheeres, who portrayed her parents’ cruel form of Christian fundamentalism in her 2005 memoir, “Jesus Land.” “I haven’t spoken to them since it was published, and they refuse to read it,” she said, adding that they cut her out of their will.

Those are extreme situations, of course. But it’s a rare memoirist who hasn’t grappled with how to depict family, friends, children or others they care about. It’s a familiar issue for Brooke Warner, the publisher of She Writes Press and a long-time memoir-writing coach, who is writing a book that includes her relationship with her ex-wife, with whom she’s raising a child.

“It’s scary,” Warner says. “You’re just like, what am I going to put out there? What are they going to think is OK?  What is their story versus your story?”

With the growing popularity of memoir as a genre of literature and popular entertainment, debates have followed about what writers can or should disclose about ex-partners, family or friends, especially when those individuals are not public figures and may not appreciate being mentioned in a best-seller. Some writers feel especially protective of children. Memoirists can change names and identifying details, as Tara Westover did in her best-selling memoir, “Educated.” But people may still come forward, Warner says, to say that scenes involving them are exaggerated, wrong or nothing like they remember. Westover’s family went public with its rebuttal, when her mother, LaRee, published a memoir of her own, “Educating.”

Cries about invading other people’s privacy followed Prince Harry’s “Spare,” a ghost-written memoir that offered an insider’s critique of his royal relatives. Harry was writing about very public people, but the New York Times review described his “punishing invasions,” while CNN anchor Don Lemon reacted with visible discomfort over Harry’s claim that Prince William pushed him to the floor during a fight about Meghan Markle.

“Everyone has a family,” Lemon said. “I have arguments in my family. Am I going to put that out there for the whole world to see?

Of course, many acclaimed memoirs involve writers putting things “out there” and creating compelling narratives around people who have done them wrong. When it comes to turning a loved one into an antagonist, Marin County-based writer Anne Lamott offers this dictum: “You own everything that happened to you. … If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

The idea that writers own their experiences is core to the memoir ethos. Memoirs are not autobiographies. They represent one person’s subjective, “emotional truth” — about what they’ve lived through and “what they know” about others, Warner explains. Memoirs re-create scenes and dialogue, fill in memory gaps and interpret what happened.

“It’s about telling a story that is full of your reactive elements, your emotional connection to the story you’re telling,” says journalist Terry Winckler, whose wife works for the Bay Area News Group. His 2023 memoir, “Tule Town,” recounts the unique people he met while working at a small-town newspaper after a fall from grace.

“I think you develop some sense about the stories that belong to others, but if their story happens to coincide with the story you’re trying to tell, then I think it’s fair game,” he says. “But you need to be careful in how you use it, because you don’t want to take advantage of somebody in a terrible position that maybe they don’t deserve.”

Journalist Meredith May, author of “The Honey Bus,” said writers should have a “greater good” in mind if they are going to reveal the “ugliness” of other people. May’s book recounts growing up in Carmel Valley in the 1970s with a loving beekeeper grandfather who provided emotional ballast after her troubled mother checked out mentally. In initial drafts, May poured out her complaints about her mother, who died in 2017, but realized another “monster mom” memoir probably wouldn’t be interesting, so she shifted focus to her empowering relationship with her grandfather.

“There’s a difference between telling your story and then taking pot shots,” May said. “It has to be in the service to the story, and you have to make those judgment calls carefully, because you have all the power as a writer.”

“Funny in Farsi” author Firoozeh Dumas took the same approach when writing her new short nonfiction piece, “Sob,” about her devastating 2022 divorce. The Palo Alto author tried not to focus on her estranged husband’s “vitriol,” she says, and more on describing the shock and grief she lived through after suddenly finding herself alone after more than 30 years of marriage.

“Nobody wants to read you ranting for a whole book, and you don’t really want to hurt someone you’ve had a profound relationship with,” she says. “What it comes down to is that I feel like it’s a real privilege to have this platform as a writer, so I’m very mindful about what I put there. I try to put my highest self in my words.”

Indeed, fans of the genre say the best memoirs don’t voyeuristically dwell on personal pain and trauma. They offer one person’s real-life insight into the complexities of a universal human experience. Mickelwait’s book, for example, is a page-turner for anyone who has discovered that their great love isn’t the person they thought or who decides to forgive their tormenter as a way to move on in life.

Meanwhile, Scheeres’ book continues to win praise for telling a story about resilience in the face of harsh parenting and for describing her deep bond with her adopted brother, David, who was the target of beatings by their father and faced racism in their rural Indiana community. Scheeres also is proud that her book helped lead to the closure of Escuela Caribe, a notorious, prisonlike Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic where she and her brother were sent to break their “rebellious teenage spirit.”

When teaching memoir writing, Warner urges students to just write their first drafts without worrying about others’ reactions or “getting things right.” Other writers agree, saying that first drafts almost never get published and subsequent drafts allow them to refine their portraits of others, change names or purge them entirely.

But writers still describe their concern about getting things “as factually accurate” as possible, especially when writing about other people, Winckler said. Writer James Frey provides an infamous example of why writers should consult the public record before describing someone’s involvement in crime or controversy, Scheeres explains. Frey was shamed by Oprah Winfrey when he admitted to fabricating crucial parts of his addiction-and-recovery memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” including a lengthy jail stint that records show never happened.

In “What My Bones Know,” Foo says that she had to “fact check” her abuse, in part because her trauma left her questioning the reliability of her memory. She knew she couldn’t ask her parents, who long denied inflicting violence, but said she interviewed scientists and psychologists to better understand complex PTSD and returned to San Jose to interview former classmates, teachers and mental health experts to investigate the effects of trauma in Asian immigrant communities. When writing about an entire community, Foo “was really terrified about getting it wrong. … That’s why it was important to do my due diligence and to ground it all in my personal experiences.”

But, as Foo found, there’s no hard rule on seeking input from people one writes about. Depending on the situation, writers can derail their process if they share their work with loved ones who are prone to contradicting their memories. They also can put themselves in jeopardy, if they try to engage their abuser, Warner says. But in less fraught situations, writers can allay others’ concerns by showing them portions of a final draft.

May found it helpful to interview people from her past, with friends remembering “wonderful” details that enriched scenes in her story. She also sought input from her father but was nervous about what he would think of her final draft. She wrote about him not being a regular presence during her childhood because he lived on the East Coast. But she said he was surprisingly OK with everything — except one detail. He told her he didn’t have a particular cat at the time of one of her summer visits. But when May offered to take the cat out, he said, “No, leave it in. It’s kind of funny.”