Treat Real People as Participants in Consequence

The effects of publication on real people count as part of the Work, weighed during the writing and not discovered afterward. That gives nobody a veto over an honest account of their conduct, and it does not require kindness.

The trap is treating people as material. It is a natural stance, since everything in a life is raw material for the book, and it is easy to feel that a person turned into a character cannot be harmed by a sentence. The person the character was drawn from can be, in reputation, employment, family relations, safety, privacy and the way they will be remembered. These costs tend to fall unevenly. The writer holds the pen, the timing and the adjectives, and the subject cannot revise.

In 1944 Anne Frank began revising her diary for possible publication, and she gave the people in it new names. The family who shared the hiding place, the Van Pels, became the Van Daan. The dentist Fritz Pfeffer, with whom she often quarreled, became Albert Dussel. The Anne Frank Fonds says she did this to preserve the anonymity of the people living with her. When her father prepared the first edition after the war, he kept those two pseudonyms, and he left out some passages, among them a piece in which she wrote harshly about his marriage to her mother.

The relationship between writer and subject is where consequences gather. In 1987 the author Joe McGinniss settled, for $325,000, a $15 million suit by Jeffrey MacDonald, a physician convicted in 1979 of killing his pregnant wife and two daughters. MacDonald had cooperated with McGinniss on Fatal Vision. He said McGinniss presented himself as a friend who believed in his innocence while holding the opposite belief. A jury trial of the suit had ended in a mistrial in August; the settlement carried no admission of liability, and McGinniss’s lawyer called the book vindicated. A hung jury and a settlement with no admission leave open who was right. Even so, a subject convicted of the gravest crime could take the writer’s conduct during the work to a jury, which heard weeks of testimony about it.

Consequence also reaches people who are not named but are identifiable: the sister, the employer, the child.

Some consequences are the point. Accountability writing exists to damage reputations that deserve it, and the Society of Professional Journalists’ code distinguishes between private people, who have a greater right to control information about themselves, and public figures and others who seek power, influence or attention. Over-protection has its own cost, since a memoir in which every person has been blurred into harmlessness says little about a life. Ask whether the harm is justified by the truth of the claim (Practice 72), by its importance, and by the person’s power relative to yours; some hurt will pass that test.

Practice. List every real person in one chapter of your manuscript who could be identified, by name or by detail, including those who appear only in passing. For each, write what they could lose if the passage were read by their employer, family, neighbors or the authorities. Mark who is exposed that you have not named. Then decide, passage by passage: keep, change details (and disclose that you did), seek the person’s response, or cut. That is ninety minutes for a chapter; for a book, repeat chapter by chapter. Each chapter yields a one-page map of who bears the risk of publication in it, with a decision beside each name.