On Writing About Real People
As an essayist, it’s my job to take experiences from real life and write about them. And oftentimes, these experiences do not take place in a vacuum; they occur with other people. And these people have their own version of events, which may differ slightly from mine. Alas, memory is fungible, reality beget by perception and emotion.
This can come as a relief at times—two people writing a story about the same events will still produce vastly different stories. Thus, no story is ever really told twice. But it does complicate the process of writing about real life. If we all experience reality differently, then how can anyone ever really be happy with the events as recorded by just one side?
The advice that’s given to nonfiction writers is often pretty polarizing. There seem to be two distinct camps—those who think it’s irresponsible to write about other people, and those who believe in writing down whatever one pleases because What’s the worst that can happen?
Speaking from experience, the worst that can happen is that your father, having read something you’ve written about him, might be led to think that you hate him, and want him to die. And worse, his dying isn’t some hypothetical, some far-off possibility to be dealt with in 10, 20, 30 years. He is currently dying—not in the way that we’re all dying, but actually dying. He’s sick, and doesn’t have much time left, and you’ve hurt him, and he thinks you hate him. And what if he dies without you first being able to convince him otherwise?
I had written something about my dad over two years back, something about how he wasn’t often at home to spend time with us, and how disappointing that was in the beginning until it began to feel so normal that it stopped being disappointing. When I sent that essay out to magazines to be published, and when it actually got picked up for publishing, I briefly worried about what he would think or say if he were to read it. What’s the worst that could happen? I repeated to comfort myself. Besides, he doesn’t care about writing. He’ll probably never even read it.
But of course, nearly every father has some interest, however hidden, in his daughter’s affairs, and of course, he read it. And he held on to it for those two entire years before bringing it up with me. The emotions he felt all those years prior only becoming stronger the more he kept it to himself.
*
After the argument with my dad, I knew I needed to look back at the essay to see what I’d written. I’d written it so long ago that I barely remembered it. Had I really made it sound like I’d hated him? Was I that hard on him? But I couldn’t bear to read it back again, because what if he was right, and I had been awful and unfair in my portrayal of him?
It took me nearly a month to be able to go back and read it.
When I did read it, I had to read it twice—the first time on the edge of my seat, speed reading through it to find the ugly thing I’d said, the second more slowly, because I hadn’t caught whatever was so bad in the first read-through.
The essay wasn’t anywhere near as bad as I thought it’d been based on his reaction. There were just two small references to him not being home for dinner or on weekends, and a reference to a rare moment spent together as a family. Less than three sentences total, and very undramatic.
It was made clear to me, rereading the essay I’d written, that the severity of the reaction of a person featured in one’s writing might not exactly correlate with the severity of what was written. But despite the fact that I felt his reaction was unwarranted, it still happened. I’d hurt him.
We had argued for hours. He asked why I hated him. I said I didn’t hate him, but that I didn’t feel very connected to him, and how could I, when he was never home growing up?
I was home! He yelled at me, exasperated.
No, you weren’t! I yelled back.
Well, I was busy at work, trying to make money to support you!
Ok, so you admit it then? You weren’t home!
Mary Karr, in her book The Art of Memoir, writes that “You need to be able to rethink and correct the easy interpretation.” Whatever your first assumption is in writing about a person and/or their motives, it’s important to go deeper, to imagine what might lie under the surface. Our first interpretations are usually those that most easily serve our own interests and narratives. It’s only upon deeper analysis that we might be able to see the uneasy truth.
I think this is part of why I failed in my original essay. I had written that my father was never home, implying that this was because he did not want to see us, when really he hadn’t been home because he was working hard, day in and day out, to provide us with everything we could ever need and then some.
The action stays the same, as do the resulting emotions, but the motive speaks wonders. I could have been more generous in what I implied in my writing, and in what I assumed to be his motive—if not for the writing, then at least for myself.
*
I once argued with a professor about this dilemma of writing about real people. She said she didn’t think mothers have the right to write about their children. I disagreed. She brought up a hypothetical scenario in which a mother were to write about having a child—regretting the decision to have said child, and writing about how regretful they were, and how they at times resented the child.
It’s not that I don’t have empathy for that hypothetical child. I do. I think of being the child of a mother who publishes an essay about how having me was the worst mistake she ever made, how it—I—brought them 18 years of misery, and I shudder. There have been times in my life in which I felt unwanted by either or both of my parents (which was surely unwarranted, but it is how I felt), and what an awful feeling that was. And I think of how that feeling would be multiplied by having that shared with the world. The shame I’d feel for not being wanted or loved by the only person that is supposed to unconditionally want and love me.
But then I think of the mother. I think of all the mothers. I think of what the world probably looked like when—and would look like now if—mothers did not ever speak up about how hard it is to be a parent, and how, sometimes, one regrets the choice. How if women didn’t know that motherhood isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, how isolating it would feel to find oneself in that position.
Some of us inevitably need to be the children of mothers that regret having us, as awful as it is. It’s just statistics. And not writing about it doesn’t make it not true.
*
I have no doubt that it feels awful to be written about in anything less than a supremely flattering light. To be honest, I’ve never been on the receiving side of such writing, and it’s not for lack of data. I’m sure plenty of people have not-nice things to say about me—they’re just not writers.
Melissa Febos, in her essay, A Big Shitty Party, writes, “It is profoundly unfair that a writer gets to author the public version [of] a story that has as many true variations as persons involved.” She’s absolutely right. There is nothing inherently wrong or abnormal with two people having different memories or perceptions of a shared experience. But the non-writer can only talk to their friends, family, therapist, or diary about it, while the writer gets to share it in a publicly distributed newsletter, literary magazine, or book.
And we aren’t always as discreet as we think we are. It doesn’t take too many details to piece together who a writer may be speaking of. In my experience with my dad, for example, a coworker of his had read it by sheer happenstance and made the connection between our last names. It doesn’t take much.
Also, more people read our writing than we might imagine. This can be hard to believe for some writers who may feel as if they’re shouting into the void, but just because it wasn’t liked or retweeted doesn’t mean it wasn’t read.
All of this taught me that while I’m in the “write whatever one pleases” camp, I also know that there’s a right and a wrong way to write about the people in our lives.
The first mistake I’d made was in assuming that what I wrote simply needs to be true. Of course, everything in nonfiction should be fact-checked, but we often have different truths with regard to the same memories. So what I’ve landed on instead is, is it fair? What I mean by that is manyfold. Is it unnecessarily harsh? Is it cruel? Is it purposefully hurtful? Is it being used to settle a score? Have the points being made been discussed with the person, or will this be the first time they’re hearing of it?
Also, a lot of writing is about speculation. It’s about trying to delve deeper than the surface to find the root, the causes—an explanation for what cannot be easily explained. We do not always come to neat conclusions. We sometimes have to fill in the blanks. What I’ve realized from my mistake is that it’s unfair to speculate about another person’s motives, or at least, that it’s unfair to speculate on others’ motives without making that clear to your readers.
When I was younger and very painfully naive, I said to someone, People always mean what they say, and say what they mean, and they shook their head at me and said, No, they never, ever do.
Rarely do we understand why people do what they do, or say what they say. Sometimes it’s the job of the writer to fill in the blanks. But sometimes it’s the job of the empathetic person to understand that it isn’t always our place to make assumptions about other people’s actions.
Febos also writes, in the same essay, “There are good essays that there are good reasons not to write.” I’m not sure I agree. I think all “good” essays—essays that explore difficult topics, that bring up difficult emotions, that acknowledge that sometimes, there is a villain—need to be written.
When I think back to the peak of my family’s dysfunction—when it became public knowledge and the source of much discussion in our small town—I don’t think of all of the people who gave me whispered apologies as they refused to meet my eyes. I think instead of the woman that did my eyebrows, and how she told me, “We all come from fucked up families, so don’t worry, it’s not just you.” The kindest, most helpful thing that anyone had said to me during that time was not a refutation of what I was going through, but an acknowledgment, acceptance, and normalization of it.
That’s why I think it’s important that I wrote about the experience, and why I think it’s important to write about all difficult experiences. You never know who the writing might find its way to—what junction in life they find themselves in—and how your writing might make them feel seen and understood—less like a pariah and more like the average.
If I hadn’t written it, then maybe my dad and I wouldn’t have gotten the benefit of having the fight. Though the fight was awful, it was also necessary. It was a fight that we should have had a lot sooner.
At the fight’s end, we’d covered so much ground, laid out all our ouches, and had actually gotten somewhere. With everything out in the open, it feels more possible to carve a way forward.
Our relationship is still imperfect—healing always a journey rather than a destination—but at least we are trying. At least we finally got to say our piece.
Arielle McManus is a writer living in Brooklyn, NY. Her writing has been published in various literary magazines, including Hobart, Passages North, and Tiny Molecules, among others. You can find her at ariellemcmanus.com or on Twitter at @ariellemcmanus.