There are those writers that relinquish their private lives to the world, choosing to share the honesty of experience, which is often difficult for those family members and friends who were part of this experience.
Changed names and confrontation come up all the time for the memoirist, but what about protecting those family members that don’t exist yet? What about the stories we tell before sons and daughters are born? Dani Shapiro writes about the experience of keeping her history under wraps for her son in her essay, “The Me My Child Mustn’t Know,” negotiating privacy for the sake of her son, with her memoir, Slow Motion.
(via the Paris Review)
