Writing about real people
Every memoir has a cast, and none of them auditioned. The people in your book were living their own lives when they wandered into yours, and the version of them that reaches print is one you wrote from memory, for your own purposes, without asking.
That is not a reason not to write it. It is the reason the craft decisions in this guide matter more here than anywhere else in nonfiction.
Where this guide stops
There are real legal questions in this territory, and they have names: defamation, privacy, the disclosure of private facts, the right of publicity, breach of confidence. Which of them exist, what they cover and what a person would have to show vary enormously — between countries, between states or provinces inside one country, and on the specific facts of your specific passage. The same paragraph can be unremarkable in one jurisdiction and a serious problem in another.
We are not going to tell you where your line is, and you should be suspicious of any page that does. What is worth saying plainly is this: if your book makes serious allegations about identifiable living people, it is worth a lawyer's read in your country before publication, not after. Reviewing pages is cheap next to the alternative, and once the book is on sale your options narrow considerably.
Everything below is about the other half of the problem, which is the half you actually control. Where the people in your book also sat down and talked to you on the record, the method that goes with it — consent, recording, transcripts, and how far a quote may be tidied — is Writing a book from interviews.
Composite characters
Merging three friends into one, or four jobs into one job, makes a tidier book. It also changes what kind of book it is.
The cost is the reader's trust, and it is only charged when the composite is undisclosed. A reader who discovers afterward that your central friendship was assembled from several people does not re-evaluate that one scene — they re-evaluate every scene, including the ones that happened exactly as written. You spend the credibility of the whole book to smooth one stretch of it.
If you use composites, say so somewhere the reader will find it. If saying so would embarrass the book, that is useful information about the composite.
Changed names are weaker than authors think
Changing a name is the standard move, and it is worth doing. It is not the protection most authors believe it is.
A name is rarely what identifies someone. The identifying material is everything around it: the town, the year, the job, the injury, the make of the car, the fact that they are your brother. A reader who knows the person will recognize them in the first paragraph, and those are precisely the readers whose reaction matters — family, colleagues, the small town in the book. "I changed the names" answers a question nobody was asking.
So treat the changed name as a courtesy to strangers rather than a shield, and do the real work on the details. Change what can be changed without making the passage false. Where a detail cannot be changed because it is load-bearing, that is a decision to make consciously.
In the tools. If your method needs explaining, it needs a page of its own. Front and back matter are built from fields, so an author's note about changed names and composites takes its place in the book without hand-formatting, and carries into the EPUB from the same source. Start your book → · about the tools
Writing about someone, or writing at them
There is usually one passage. You know the one. It is aimed at a particular person, it has been rehearsed for years, and in draft it feels like the reason you are writing the book at all.
It reads small on the page. The reader has no history with this person, cannot see the provocation, and registers only the temperature of the prose. A settled score in a memoir does not read as justice; it reads as an author losing composure, and it makes the reader distrust the calmer chapters around it.
The test is direction. Are you writing about this person so the reader understands something, or at them so they will finally understand something? Write the passage — it may be the only way to get past it — then cut it, or rewrite it at the temperature of the rest of the book. Accuracy survives that edit. Only the aim is lost.
Your story overlaps theirs
Most of memoir is shared territory. Your childhood is also your mother's adulthood; your divorce is also somebody else's divorce.
Two things are true at once, and holding both is the actual skill. Your experience is yours to tell, and no one else has standing to edit your account of your own life. Their private facts — a diagnosis, a sexuality they have not disclosed, an affair, a police matter — are a separate question, and the fact that you know them does not make them yours to publish.
Ask which parts of the overlap the reader needs in order to follow your story. That is usually less than you assumed while drafting.
Practical moves
- Let time pass. A year between the last draft and publication changes what you think is essential. Almost nobody regrets the wait.
- Show the pages, where that is safe and possible. Not the whole book, and not for approval — the relevant pages, so the person is not ambushed by a stranger's copy. Do not do this where contact would put you or anyone else at risk.
- Audit the identifying details. Take each one in turn and ask what it earns. Details that only prove you were there can go.
- Be accurate rather than generous or cruel. Flattery and attack are both distortions, and both read as unreliable. The exact account is the one that holds up.
The author's note
A short note explaining your method — reconstructed dialogue, changed names, composites, what you checked and how — is legitimate, underused, and it costs half a page. See What goes in the front of a book, and in what order for where it sits. Readers do not mind knowing how memory was handled. They mind finding out later.
Make your book
The tools are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Fact-checking your own book · More: Publishing under a pen name · Quoting other people's work in your book · Beta readers: what to ask, and when