Writing True Stories about Folks and Family

Writing about Folks and Family

In her bestselling memoir, “The Glass Castle,” Jeannette Walls writes about how her mother urged her author daughter to “just tell the truth.”

However, in many families, writing about the relatives is not that simple. For nonfiction authors, the familial nay-saying can range from quibbling over time, place and facts to downright outrage at being shown in a less-than-flattering light.

As essayists and memoirists and storytellers, we’ve all encountered that reader or listener who remembers the details or truth of the story or the scene differently.

“Oh, no,” a sibling might say. “It was Aunt Julia who came for Christmas and drank all the cognac that year.”

Fair enough. Maybe it was.

In his essay, “The Creative Nonfiction Police?” Lee Gutkind, founder and editor of Creative Nonfiction, urges nonfiction writers to “strive for the truth.”

But which or whose truth? And how to choose between your and the other person’s recollections or versions?

Of course, before you write about that fabled, 1978 Christmas with the aunties, you could always take a rummage through the family albums to fact-check your details.

Or, sans the box of family Polaroids, we essayists can cop to our own flawed or murky memories-right there on the published page and as part of the essay’s narrative. In fact, this admission about the unreliability of memory is often a good way to draw your reader “in.”

“Memory,” we might write, “is a slippery thing, so that year, I couldn’t tell you if it was Aunt Julia or Auntie Maggie who drank all the Christmas cognac.”

By the way, if you want a standout example of how one writer blends both fact-checked corroboration and her own, out-loud attempt to patch together a semi-forgotten past, read Natasha Trethewey’s memoir, “Memorial Drive.”

Then, there’s that other truth that goes way beyond dates and facts. Here, I’m talking about the truth that makes someone else in your life look cruel or negligent or flawed.

American author Anne Lamott that if people didn’t want to be written about, they should have behaved better. But by maligning them—at least without thinking hard about your motivations in doing so—aren’t you now behaving badly, too?

So to tell or not to tell? And just how much?

When it comes to revealing unflattering truths about people in your life, here’ are 4 questions I nudge my nonfiction writing students to ask themselves:

(a) In the deepest part of my soul, how much does it matter to me to tell my own story and its temporal and emotional truths?

(b) Why am I telling this particular story now?

(c) Am I willing to risk and accept the potential fallout—all the way up to family estrangement—if or when my piece or book gets published?

(d) If this piece is on the Web 10 years from now, how will I feel? How will my children or my children’s friends or teachers potentially react?

Of course, there’s the issue of libel which, by the way, can also apply to fiction writing.

Overall, perhaps the best approach to writing about others is the “do unto others” golden rule, or, to borrow from the medical world and its Hippocratic oath, to “do no harm.”

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