How Candid Should a Memoirist Be?

Memoirs, by definition, are authors’ own stories about their pasts. But no one can tell her or his own story without mentioning other people. How can a memoirist be honest and open, as memoir demands (although of course all self-portrayals are selected and shaped), yet be fair to these other people in their lives, and preserve their privacy? So one way for a memoirist to possibly hurt other people is to portray them unfairly or violate their privacy. Another (related) way is, as author Dani Shapiro writes about in a recent (7/17/11) New York Times Book Review essay, titled "The Me My Child Mustn't Know," to write something about oneself that might – at the time or later – embarrass oneself and others in one’s life. OK, let’s be specific. Shapiro writes about how her first memoir, “Slow Motion,” was written “with abandon, a kind of take-no-prisoners story about dropping out of college at 20 and, in a booze- and drug-induced haze, becoming involved in a destructive affair with a much older married man, the stepfather of my best friend.” But now she realizes that at the time of writing the memoir, she “wasn’t projecting forward to a lifetime later, when, as a Connecticut wife and mother in my 40s,” she would worry about how her son would feel reading or hearing about the events in her book. She ponders ways in which her identity as a writer and her identity as a mother clash, with different priorities and concerns. If she had known she would have a child, would she have written the memoir? On the one hand, she believes that if a person is to write about herself, she should be honest. On the other hand, she wants to protect her son, and worries about the consequences of his reading the book at some point. She concludes that “as a writer, my inner life is my only instrument. I understand the world only by my attempts to shape my experience on the page….Without these attempts…I am lost.” So she chooses openness. Is it the right choice?