This is the second chapter from The Autobiographer’s Handbook we’re excerpting on The Rumpus. As we pointed out in the first entry, something went wrong in the marketing of this great book on memoir. These Rumpus excerpts stand alone, but if you’re working on autobiography we think you’ll be well served by picking up the handbook, which you can purchase through Powell’s.

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In all likelihood, your memoir will include your friends and family. Because they are not getting an advance, some of them (perhaps understandably) might object to showing up in your book, especially in any scenes that involve things they’d rather forget. This is a tricky business, and it requires tact, diplomacy, and, sometimes, fearlessness. It also requires skill. How do you translate your loved ones-and less-loved ones-to the page? Do you mention their perms and gabardine slacks? The hash-mark wrinkles around their mouths from a lifetime of pursing their lips? And then there is the fear that you will depict them so accurately that they will call their lawyers. How do you weigh your right to tell your own story against someone else’s right that you not tell theirs? Then again, most authors find that their family and friends get upset not about being in your book, but about not being in it enough.

THE GOLDEN RULE(S)

Firoozeh Dumas: I have a simple rule: If it involves me, I can write about it. If it involves others, I often get their permission. If it involves me and others, and I need to have them in my story, regardless of how they feel about it, I aim for fairness. In Funny in Farsi, I wrote about my mother-in-law with whom I had a horrible relationship. It was really challenging because a part of me really wanted to let her have it but I ended up only sharing what I had to in order to tell my story. We now get along really well and no, we have never discussed the book. Assuming she read the book, I like to think she realized that I was not trying to be mean but was just telling my story. Not every story I write is flattering, but I try to be fair. My intention is never to hurt anyone with my words. I just tell my truth and sometimes, my subjects don’t like the way they have been portrayed. Since I do make every effort to be fair, it does not bother me that someone might complain. That’s just part of life when you write nonfiction. I would never, ever reveal someone’s secret or write something intentionally embarrassing or hurtful. That’s what journals are for.

Caroline Kraus: Keeping to the truth is my chief policy, though that is not reason enough to write about someone. I think it’s a case-by-case decision, but in my view, knowingly hurting someone in print, even with the truth, had better serve an unimpeachable purpose. On the other hand, writers cannot control how people will react, and it may happen that feelings are hurt in spite of honest and honorable intentions. So it’s something to weigh carefully in every instance.

Anthony Swofford: The only policy about writing about other people is to be honest. They cannot counter honesty. My younger sister has asked me to never write about her, so I won’t. Everyone else is fair game.

Tobias Wolff: With the exception of my immediate family, I always change the names of other people. I will often change their occupations. I do what I can to keep the essence of a person’s character and behavior, but I try not to leave such a trail that he or she would be embarrassed by a friend reading the book.

Jonathan Ames: Try not to hurt anyone. But this doesn’t have to be the rule for all writers. You have to be fearless as a writer and as a consequence, people can get hurt. I have hurt some people–though I’ve only been confronted once–but it’s something I really try to avoid.

David Rakoff: Avoid the ad hominem attack. I once interviewed a congressman at a party while he was eating. His table manners were bad. Terrible, in fact. Car accident-like. I can make myself skip meals even now just thinking about them. I think he managed to get crème caramel on his glasses. But I didn’t use it because it had nothing to do with the story or what he believed. Save it for the fiction, I suppose.

Art Spiegelman: I was totally oblivious when I was doing Maus. There are issues. Maybe that’s how fiction gets born. You want to say what happened but if you do you’ll be sitting around with lawyers for the next twelve years.

Ishmael Beah: You definitely have to ask the people you decide to write about. Not everyone wants to go public with his or her stories. You have to ask them to allow you to write about them the way you view them, relate to them, not how they view themselves. Be honest with them about this to avoid future confrontations.

Frank McCourt: There were certain things I left out, on the advice of my editor. I didn’t want to hurt anyone, and I certainly didn’t want anyone suing me.

Nick Flynn: I think in one’s drafts one should be free to write out whatever small-heartedness and pettiness and anger one can access, and then slowly cook this raw emotion down. In general, I think it’s a bad idea to view writing a memoir as a chance to grind an ax, so whenever I find myself doing that, I tend to keep it to myself. Ax-grinding is perhaps better suited for op-eds or talk radio.

Stephen Elliott: My primary rule is that I don’t identify people in a way that would hurt their lives or their jobs. They might know I’m writing about them, recognize themselves, but I usually change enough so that their co-workers won’t recognize them.

Steve Almond: The only real policy I have is to honor your experience. Any other course-for instance, writing to seek revenge, or to make yourself look good-amounts to exploitation. You’re not dealing in truth at that point.

Phillip Lopate: I consider each time what the traffic will bear, in each circumstance. If the person is dead, I am tempted to be more candid. I have no set rules or guidelines in this area. It depends partly on how important the story is, and how much or little I am burning to write it. I pick and choose when to write about other people, how dangerous it would be for me to confide their secrets, and stay away from those elements that I deem too harmful to them. That said, I have often given offense-you can’t please ‘em all.

Janice Erlbaum: I did leave out some people and events from my memoir, in some cases because there wasn’t enough room or time to discuss them fully, and in other cases because I wanted to spare people’s feelings. The problem is, you’ll never spare people’s feelings when you write about them-some people were angry that they were left out! And I didn’t cut out anything that was really vital to the story-if an event told you something important about me or another character, I left it in, despite the fact that it could upset someone else. Sometimes the truth hurts, but as long as it’s the truth, it’s fair game. However, if you’re holding a grudge against someone, it’s probably best not to write about them yet, until you’ve got some clarity as to why they acted the way they did towards you; otherwise, your book will come off as biased, and you won’t be a reliable, relatable narrator. There’s no point in humiliating someone just because you can. Readers won’t like you for it, and you won’t like yourself.

Azadeh Moaveni: If I cared enough about a given person’s reaction, I would be certain to check out with them in advance what sort of detail about themselves they were comfortable sharing publicly.

Paul Collins: It sounds simplistic, but if I’m not prepared to live with the results of someone seeing it and not liking it, then I don’t write it in the first place. And if I am, then I do write it. Because they will see it, sooner or later.

Ellen Forney: So far, so good. Most of my autobiographical work has been upbeat, though I Was Seven in ’75 was all about the joys of growing up in a non-traditional family. I’m currently looking down the barrel of a more difficult autobiographical story, though, and I haven’t resolved this question. I assume most autobiographical artists wrestle with this issue. Exposing your own self is one thing, but exposing your friends, families, and even enemies takes either callousness, great sensitivity, or a careful balance of both.

Esmeralda Santiago: My only policies in writing about other people is never to be mean, even if they were, and to resist the urge to get even with all the jerks and ignoramuses that have crossed my path.

A.J. Jacobs: A friend of mine who is an investigative reporter taught me a brilliant trick. If she’s ever writing a negative article about some one, she makes sure to say right up front that he or she is good looking. Appeal to their vanity. So then when you slam them later in the article, they won’t care as much. I did that with my brother-in-law. He’s this Harvard-educated blowhard (a loveable blowhard, in case he reads this). So when I introduced him in my first book, I started out with a physical description: I said he’s moderately good-looking, not balding, and kind of resembles John Cusack, which all happen to be true. When he read the book, he called me and said, “Well, I came off like a cock, but at least you said I was moderately good-looking.”

HOW SAID PEOPLE REACT

Sean Wilsey: I got some weird reactions from various people. My stepmother threatened to sue me. My mother was all over the map with it. The nicest thing she told me was, “Sean, it’s such an accurate portrait of so many people that I know that I’ve had to conclude it must be an accurate portrait of me, too. And so I’m really going to have to take a look at the fact that I come across that way.” And then there are tertiary characters who, to a person, have been really nice about it. I did get an email from an ex-girlfriend who said, “I will forgive you for just referring to me as a pack-a-day smoker who laughed at your jokes in history class instead of your girlfriend who gave you lots of blow jobs, because I understand that in a memoir there is not room enough for everyone.” Not a response I expected-and not how I remember things at all! So people will be all over the place. And you have to be true to what you remember, because who knows what they’ll say.

Frank Mccourt: Generally, my family, my brothers and so on, were all excited. In the town of Limerick, I was unpopular with some people. It was a very small group, and they got all the publicity. Squeaky wheel gets the grease, as they say in America.

Alison Smith: I was the first person in my family to go to college. When I came home in the middle of my freshman year and announced that I was going to be an English major, my father shook his head. “We work in factories,” he said. “What are you going to do, work in an English factory?” Years later when I decided to try to write a book, he thought that was just about the worst idea I’d ever come up with, worse even than being an English major! So I was really nervous about showing him the book. Finally, the summer before publication, I got up the courage to send him a copy of the manuscript. He read the entire book in two days. He called me and said, “You’re a good writer, baby. You did a good job!” My mother died two months after the book was sold. She never got a chance to read it. But my mom was never accepting of what she called “my lifestyle.” While she was dying, she had this code for how we would talk about things. If I went to a movie or I was reading a book and she asked about it, she would say, “Would I like it?” “Would I like it?” was code for: does it have any lesbian content? I had to say, Yes, if there was no lesbian content, and No, if there was lesbian content. I always followed her rule. In the one conversation I had with her about the book, she asked me, “Would I like it?” I decided to break her rule. I told her what I think is the truth. I said, “Mom, I think you’d love it.”

Rachel Howard: Most of them were fine with it. I knew the book would be very emotional for my grandparents (my father’s parents) and wasn’t sure if they’d read it. At some point I decided they must not have read it, and for a while that was disappointing to me, but I appreciated that they never spoke ill of it. I thought it was simply an intense subject for them and that was fine. Then just last month I learned from my uncle that my grandparents have been deeply upset about the book for the last two years but never told me. I wish I had known because I could have talked to them about it. Now my grandmother has died. In fact, I was right-they never did read the book. My grandfather got to a line in the first chapter in which I describe him as having “dirty blonde hair” and took it as a slight. He decided I was trying to depict the family as a bunch of unhygienic rednecks. Obviously relations between us are such that anything I’d written would have upset him. I just wish he’d told me so that we could have had a conversation about it. Now that I know, I’m getting a clear signal from my uncles that it’s not okay for me to talk to my grand father about any of this. My father’s third wife Sherrie is depicted quite unflatteringly in the book, and this was a huge ethical quandary for me. I tried to be as fair to her as possible, but I decided that I had to be truthful about how I’d felt about her. Of course, it’s extremely charged because members of my family have long suspected her of being involved in my father’s death. I don’t know if she has read the book, but I suspect she has. I have no regrets about how I depicted anyone, except for one line in which I describe a college boyfriend as a “pimply-faced nice guy.” The pimply-faced comment was simply uncalled for.

Elizabeth Gilbert: [They reacted] very well, actually. But I was careful-very careful. Particularly when it came to writing about my ex-husband, I was terribly careful. I didn’t use his name and I shared as few details as humanly possible about the reasons our marriage fell apart or the details of the divorce. If I could’ve written about divorce without writing about my divorce, I would have-but I had to mention at least some information. But I was very careful and, I hope, very respectful. For the most part, though, I haven’t encountered big problems when it comes to writing about real people, mainly, I think, because I don’t write from a place of malice, but usually from a place of love. I’ve heard it said that there are two kinds of writers-satirists and celebrants. I’m a celebrant. I don’t want to write about people if I can’t celebrate them, and so-even when I describe people’s flaws-I think they know that, in my heart, and at the end of the day (or page), I am loving them and presenting them in the best possible light. If somebody is anything less than worth loving, they aren’t likely to show up in my writing.

Phillip Lopate: You can never anticipate how people will react to what you write about them. In my book Being With Children, I drew some portraits of teachers that were critical, and they did not bat an eyelash; other teachers, whom I did not write about, were offended. Sometimes you can write very favorably about someone in a paragraph or a page, and they resent being a cameo in your story when they see themselves as the center of the universe.

Firoozeh Dumas: Almost everyone loved it. One person told me not to include her in my next book. The relatives I left out were more upset.

Anthony Swofford: In the end most people were happy to be in print. One guy thought he didn’t get enough ink so he was a bit upset.

Beth Lisick: My parents reacted strongly at first, in a negative way. I portrayed them as the lovely angels they are, but what they were bummed about were the personal things I revealed about myself. I have a good relationship with them, and they thought they knew me pretty well, but the allusion to sexual relations with a butch dyke and the disclosure about the abortion were a little much to take. I felt really bad. I didn’t want them to be ashamed of me. Luckily, twenty-four hours later they forgave me and threw a party for me at their house with a big deli tray from the supermarket.

Laura Fraser: The main character loved it. He was incredibly flattered. My Italian friends liked it, too, although they don’t read English, so they’re not sure what I said. One guy I dated called to say that he didn’t know that I didn’t like him. This was after a date I wrote about where he told me that if I had plastic surgery on my nose, I’d be pretty. It was a funny story and revealing about my bad dates at the time, and I have to say I wrote about it without considering his feelings. I’d write it again.

Jonathan Ames: I try never to hurt anyone or unduly expose anyone, and so for the most part no one has been hurt or offended. Then again not all people I’ve written about have read my books.

David Rakoff: I don’t really write about people I know. I keep on waiting for one woman from one of the chapters to show up at a reading with a vial of acid, but she hasn’t yet. For the most part, as I said before, I try really hard not to sell people out who might not necessarily have signed on to be written about. On the other hand, if you’re a gay Republican advocating vile policies against your own best interests and supporting a false, immoral war so you can keep a tax cut? Then, sorry …

Janice Erlbaum: Most of the people who appeared in my book felt that I’d portrayed them, and myself, honestly, so they were okay with the book-even some people who I’d portrayed as kind of jerky emailed me to say they understood why I’d written what I had, and forgave me for writing potentially hurtful things. But some people felt embarrassed by their actions in the past, and did not like to be reminded of them by what I’d written. They’ve been less than forgiving. The person who was angriest about my book was someone I left out-”Wasn’t I important to you?” she asked. She was, but there wasn’t room to write about everyone. So she felt my book was dishonest, because she wasn’t included.

Steve Almond: It’s always a mixed bag. Some are thrilled for the attention. Others feel misrepresented, or exposed, and get upset. In the end, you have to be able to tell yourself that you tried your best to tell the truth about the people you wrote about. That’s your essential job. The rest depends on how your subjects react, which is up to them. It depends on the context. I’m sure old girlfriends don’t necessarily appreciate showing up in an essay, but the guys who run the candy companies I wrote about in Candyfreak were pretty psyched to be written about.

Gus Lee: I think my West Point classmates who were largely identified had a hoot about appearing in the story; the tales I related were true and those times are always cause for either instant mirth or deep reflection. Ditto for my D.A. colleagues in the fourth novel, my Army buddies in the third, and my relatives in the fifth. Everyone named in my nonfiction work on courage appeared by individual consent. My guess is that they, being humble and courageous leaders, were a little embarrassed by my extolling their strengths. I haven’t asked the villains in the true stories how they felt about appearing in print. One notable is serving multiple life terms and three had promising public careers truncated by the events I described. In some cases, I don’t know what has happened to the antagonists who, at one time, had worried me and others, so much.

Azadeh Moaveni: I found people’s reactions utterly unpredictable and mysteriously subjective. People I imagined would be furious were grateful and understanding, and people I reference so fleetingly and benignly that I hadn’t even anticipated their reaction ended up wanting to challenge me to a duel.

Matthue Roth: Most people were okay with it-a surprising few were even excited. One person asked to be hugely disguised, which I did. I had to change parts of the story, for which I complained loudly and excruciatingly and, in the end, left to my editors-who removed one line, changed another, and actually solved all the problems.

Dan Kennedy: There seemed to be this understanding that they would receive a substantial discount on the book, which really rubbed me the wrong way. We had a family meeting and I made it perfectly clear that they were to pay full retail. I think I eventually softened up a bit and offered them an educator’s discount on orders of more than fifteen copies at a time.

ON WRITING ABOUT FAMILY

Steve Almond: Yeah, that’s a big issue. My family is pretty good about this stuff. But a lot of people have trouble with being written about. They feel it’s embarrassing, or best left private. There’s no way around this. You have to believe in the mission of what you’re writing about, and not censor yourself. You can’t write scared. At the same time, if you think a family member is going to be devastated by what you write, you need to think about what’s more important-your memoir, or that person’s feelings.

Stephen Elliott: They reacted terribly. My father used to joke, “I only handcuffed you to a pipe one time and look how many stories you’ve written about it.”

Firoozeh Dumas: The people who were the most upset were those relatives that I did not include in my stories. They assumed I did not love them enough. Oy.

Paul Collins: Mine was an unusual case, because I was writing about a non-verbal child-first because he was a baby, and then because he’s autistic. Morgan’s autism is quite apparent when you meet him-it’s not as if this is a secret, and so why treat it that way? And so I wrote very forthrightly about him. He is who he is and there’s nothing to apologize for or be ashamed of in that. But I would be ambivalent in writing about a typical child-someone who might be very self-conscious about what I said.

A.J. Jacobs: They were okay with it. The Year of Living Biblically was a little tense-I wrote a lot about the black sheep of the family, this guy who used to be married to my aunt. He’s a bizarre character -he used to lead a cult, he’s now an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem. My family doesn’t like him. But he was just too enticing a character to leave out. So I went ahead and met him without telling my family. And then I showed them the chapters after I’d written them. They weren’t happy, but it was a fair portrait of him, a warts-and-all characterization, so they ended up forgiving me.

Esmeralda Santiago: My family has been very generous about the way they are portrayed in my books. They understand that this is my version of events, the way I experienced my life, even if they were a part of it.

Dan Kennedy: In all honesty, they were really cool. That’s a pretty bland answer, I guess, but it’s the truth. Early on my dad said, “Anything with us is fair game if you can get some material out of it.”

Jonathan Ames: When my first novel came out, my parents and I went to a family counselor and I was able to tell my parents what was true in the book and what was not true. Since then, they’ve become increasingly accepting, if not inured, to what I write.

Azadah Moaveni: Some of my relatives were astonishingly petty, upset that I hadn’t depicted their class status properly. I have a branch of the family that is still not speaking to me, though I suppose I’m better off than other Iranian memoirists I know, who’ve been threatened with lawsuits by their relatives.

Julia Scheeres: I no longer have a relationship with my parents as the result of my memoir. But things were always strained between us, and I was okay with this possibility. In fact I found it tremendously liberating to write them and tell them I was tired of pretending everything was fine when it wasn’t. We’ve never liked each other. There’s always been a great deal of tension between us, for reasons explored in my book. I guess some families are just like that-just because you’re born into a family or to a set of parents doesn’t meant you get along with them. My one goal in Jesus Land was to immortalize my brother David, to record his life. My allegiance was to him, not to my parents, who were physically and emotionally abusive toward him. I told them I wanted to drop the facade. The most common question I get from readers is asking what my parents’ reaction was to my book. I know from the grapevine they have refused to read it, and have called it a “pack of lies” outright. That’s fine, I don’t seek their approval. The best feedback I get from readers is that they feel they know David after reading my memoir to the point where they sincerely mourn his loss, so I feel like I did my job.

Gus Lee: My father, even though I cleverly changed his name, somehow identified himself and absolutely hated being in print. Few families enjoy having their uncomfortable pasts revealed, and Chinese Confucian/Buddhist/patriarchal clans are no exception. Sadly, my sisters were unhappy that I had not only given our father a pseudonym; I had disguised him by omitting his many family crimes. They thought a former prosecutor ought to have done a better job. They were probably right. By the time I wrote the memoir Chasing Hepburn, I had found the ability to forgive our father. I admired his telling me the truth about his life. It was, and remains, a priceless gift.

SOME WORDS OF WARNING AND ADVICE

Nick Hornby: I really didn’t think anyone was going to read my book. I thought it would come out, maybe get a couple of nice reviews and die a peaceful death. But it sold a million copies in the U.K. and got translated into a lot of languages. So when you’re writing your memoir, imagine this: your next door neighbors will read it. Your dad’s boss will read it. Your mother’s book group will read it. You still think that joke about your sister’s acne is worth it? Because she’s going to get teased about it once a week for the next ten years. If this memoir is for your benefit, fine. But if you want it to be read, think hard about what you actually need to expose. I thought hard about the big stuff, not hard enough about the little stuff. And yes, I made a silly crack about my sister that both she and I regret.

Tobias Wolff: You have to accept that other people are probably not going to like it. Nobody wants to surrender control of their story to someone else. Generally speaking, I’ve fared pretty well with my family. My father was dead. My stepfather certainly hated my first memoir, but my mother took it in stride. She thought it was 80 percent true, which is actually a pretty good score. If you allow the concerns of family members to impede the writing of what you consider your story to be, you’ll never write. You’ll be held hostage to their anxieties. But I sympathize with those anxieties. “They can write their own damn story” is not an answer-not everyone can write, and it doesn’t really let them reclaim their privacy. There’s always going to be a sense that you’ve transgressed on the privacy of others. But like dictatorships and corrupt institutions, families have always been extremely secretive-they don’t like to have anything but the authorized version of themselves presented to the public. But I think it’s our privilege to write truthfully about the institutions that control our lives, and to tell our personal stories as well, even if those fly in the face of family mythologies that others have taken great care to nurture.

Sean Wilsey: Make sure you know where you stand with your family. If you’re going to burn your bridges, be sure you really don’t love or need the people on the other side of them. I went into this knowing that my stepmother was pure poison and not caring if I ever spoke to her again. My mom was profoundly different. I wanted to tell the truth but I also wanted to continue to have a relationship with my mom, and that was really tricky. So know where you stand.

Sarah Vowell: The only person who has had a problem with what I’ve written about myself is me. I wrote my most personal pieces for a fledgling public radio show, starting when I was twenty-six years old. I felt like I was revealing things about myself to the microphone in a studio in Chicago. Boy, was I surprised to find out there were people on the other end listening. Eleven years later, I’m way more reserved and careful about what I reveal. That probably makes me a less brave writer but I don’t really care. I’m more cautious but I’m also more experienced, so I think that balances things out. Like, my earlier writing was more open and raw and immediate but I think it was also less profound and funny. I don’t mind trading a little bravery for a dash of depth.

Steve Almond: Well, you have to be willing to write about your subjects fearlessly, or you shouldn’t write about them at all. If you’re going to hold back on your family-or a particular experience, or relative, or dynamic-then write about other things first, ones where you can be rock-bottom honest. It’s also true that you have to be able to go home again, so if there are relatives whose feelings you would hurt by writing about them, then you have to weigh that-not hurting them-against your desire to tell that particular set of truths to the world.

Alison Smith: You cannot think about how people will react to your writing while you are writing. Especially when you are writing a first draft. First drafts are for you. When you write your first draft I think you should close the door of the world and write the truest, most complete account you can. When you start to panic, thinking that you are revealing too much, or telling family secrets, or casting someone in an unflattering light, remind yourself that this draft is only for your eyes. Later, once you understand your material, you can choose what to reveal and what to conceal.

David Matthews: To anyone who doesn’t like the way you’ve rendered them, tell them to write their own book. As a memoirist, your first duty is to tell your own story, as truthfully as you can. (This doesn’t mean objectively-it means the emotional truths of an experience as it felt to you.) If you decide to write about family, your first concern should be the story, your concerns about family should be, like, fifth on your list. You’re a writer, or you’re not. You tell your truths or you don’t. If you don’t, you can still be a writer, but you won’t be a very good one. My advice is make sure you don’t get sued, but beyond that, write about anything and anyone that makes your story interesting. No matter what. If you wanted to be loved by everyone, you wouldn’t be a writer, you’d be a camp counselor.

Dan Kennedy: Just remember that there’s a kind of dangerous dynamic with writing–you write alone, in some little secret room where you’re enveloped in your own little reality, but the truth is, everything you’re typing is going out of that place and into the world, so just remember that. You can get to thinking that you’re typing to yourself in your little room, but you’re really sending something out across the country. To people you haven’t even met. I think if you keep that in mind, it’s little harder to get in trouble.

Azadeh Moaveni: Beware of the mischievous, invisible hand of your own subconscious!

Firoozeh Dumas: I hate it when people write memoirs to get back at their families. Go to therapy, keep a journal, work on your own stuff. Writing is not vengeance. A great example of this is Tobias Wolff, who writes about his stepdad. The guy was as awful as they get but the memoir is so much more than that. I could tell that by the time Tobias wrote his story, he had moved beyond the pain and was writing from the other side. For me, that is what makes the story compelling, and not the fact that the stepdad was awful.

Esmeralda Santiago: My only words of advice are that you should be ready to defend every word you publish in a book. So, don’t lie, don’t make up stories, and write about people in all their complexity. People are never all good or all bad. Look at the flaws as well as the virtues and you will write about real people, not caricatures. When people recognize themselves as complex individuals, they will be less likely to be rankled by their portrayal.

Gus Lee: I recommend letting your relatives and to-be-named or alluded-to friends know what you’re doing. I would ask for their input and see if you can accommodate their wishes without impairing the integrity of your story, i.e., its fundamental moral imperative truths.

Paul Collins: You’ll live with your family a lot longer than you live with critics or readers. Measure your words accordingly.

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Purchase The Autobiographer’s Handbook.

Read the first excerpt, The Facts vs. The Truth.

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