How—After 15 Years—I Stopped Panicking, Started Declawing, and Finally Published My Memoir

"At last, I took my teachers’ and mentors’ advice, and scrutinized my own behavior more than anyone else’s."

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Recently several people have asked for my perspective on writing about others in memoir, so I’m reprinting this piece of mine here. - SB

Of all the highs and lows I encountered on the road to publishing my memoir, I couldn’t have predicted this one: a week after I mailed my father an uncorrected galley, he sent me a gushing email telling me how much he loved it, and how proud of me he was. 

This came as an utter shock. Not only is my octogenarian dad not in the target demographic for an essay collection about being a Gen-X woman; to date, he’s also not been the biggest fan of a particular aspect of my first-person writing, namely the part where I write about him and painful times our family went through. 

I’d mailed him the book with trepidation. I could barely sleep from the second USPS tracking indicated my package had landed, to the moment several days later when his email arrived. Actually, I’d been losing sleep over potentially upsetting him for a lot longer than that; like, the entire year I worked on the book. No, much longer—since the summer of 2007, when he felt hurt by what I wrote an essay I published in the New York Times about the effect my parents’ marriage and divorce had on my misguided relationship patterns as a younger woman. 

In that essay I revealed a lot about my father’s behavior back in the ’70s—not the most flattering portrait. For years after its publication, we fought. I’d included much more detail about him and his choices than he was comfortable with then—and, notably, more than I would be comfortable with if I were first writing the piece today, now that my sense of the ethics around writing about other people has shifted in a kinder, more generous direction.

This shift, which greatly informed my memoir-writing and revising, has been occurring in slow motion over the fifteen years since I published that essay, a long, anxious period during which I dragged my feet on writing my book. Our conflict over the essay sparked a laser-focused quest to determine what was fair game when it came to writing about the people in our lives. It began with informally asking colleagues how they’ve handled writing about others, but then became something more concrete—an interview column on The Rumpus called “Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me,” for which I interviewed published memoirists, beginning with Vivian Gornick, author of one of my all-time favorite books, Fierce Attachments, a portrait of her relationship with her difficult mother.

For years I felt as if I were suspended in amber. But while as a writer I was frozen, as an editor and teacher I was busy encouraging others to be brave in expressing difficult stories that involved other people. 

All the interviewees have had an impact on me, but over the years, none more than Melissa Febos, who’d published her first memoir, Whip Smart: The True Story of a Secret Life, a couple of years before we spoke in 2013—and who since has written about her own significant shift in thinking on the subject in her latest book, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, a craft memoir. 

In our conversation back then, I asked Melissa how she overcame her fear of hurting her parents by writing about them, and about her own darker secrets that might upset them. “I guess the writer in me has more clout than the daughter in me,” she replied. “It wins every fucking time.” The interview marked the beginning of a friendship. Melissa went on to interview me, to contribute to one of my anthologies, to lead a workshop at the co-working space for writers that I operated in Kingston, NY, before the pandemic caused me to shutter it, and more generally to stay in touch. For a time, once in a while when I’d post publicly about my writing fears, she’d email or DM me, reminding me to “Let the writer win, Sari Botton.”

Order the book.

I wasn’t so sure about that advice, though. Each time I tried to imagine once again writing with abandon about some of the more painful moments from my childhood, parents’ feelings be damned, I completely freaked myself out and abandoned my work. I continued to stall on writing my memoir, and to largely avoid publishing personal essays that might reveal things my parents (and others) would prefer I kept silent about. I considered writing under a pseudonym and interviewed other pseudonymous writers about that, but resented the idea of having to hide myself, especially after decades of working to build a “platform” under my own name. 

It was all so frustrating. For years I felt as if I were suspended in amber. But while as a writer I was frozen, as an editor and teacher I was busy encouraging others to be brave in expressing difficult stories that involved other people. 

It was in those capacities that my internal shift first began to manifest itself. As more writers and students spoke of how conflicted they were over revealing others’ truths—and as the legal team in one place I worked killed a story about emotional abuse out of a fear that one of the subjects might legitimately sue for either “defamation of character” or “invasion of privacy”—I became determined to help them strike a balance; to both speak out and respect others’ preferences (or demands) to remain anonymous. (And, well, not get sued.)

I started suggesting they seriously blur anyone who might take issue with what they wrote, changing names and other identifying characteristics—although that’s not a bullet-proof approach, especially when you’re writing about parents and others in similarly recognizable positions in your life. (I love the funny way Taffy Brodesser-Akner addresses how tricky this is in the lede of a GQ story about getting high with her mother: “My mother (not her real name) and I get out of the cab at the corner of Kill Me Street and Carjack Avenue, in the Beyond Thunderdome section of south San Francisco.) 

I had a hard time taking my own advice. I was still too paralyzed with fear. 

I also started suggesting that after they got all their frustrations out in early drafts, they extract any highly-charged details that weren’t absolutely necessary for context, or to move the dramatic action forward—that once they’d told those parts to themselves, they’d find it less objectionable to let them go.

These approaches worked well for many of them, and I was pleased. But I had a hard time taking my own advice. I was still too paralyzed with fear. 

Then I attended the 2019 edition of the AWP Conference in Portland Oregon, and heard Melissa speak on a panel about the challenges inherent in writing about people in your life. She confessed to regrets regarding some things she’d written about a particular person in her life. 

She also talked about that much-memed Anne Lamott quote, the one burgeoning memoirists rely on to justify writing whatever they want about people they believe have hurt them—”You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should've behaved better.”—and how facile a notion that is. No, Melissa insisted, the business of writing about other people requires much greater thought and care, and sometimes the messy work of sharing with them what you’re planning to publish before you do, with enough time to possibly revise it, depending on their response.

Order Melissa Febos’s Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

Melissa had clearly changed her mind since we’d spoken all those years ago. Instead of making me feel more limited, hearing her impart this new perspective somehow made me feel liberated. There were ways for me to do this work with greater integrity. It could make it all feel less dangerous—safer.

I returned home from AWP in early March and, almost miraculously, immediately got my ass in gear—that June finally finishing the book proposal I’d been struggling with forever. A few months later, I signed a contract with Heliotrope for And You May Find Yourself…Confessions of a Late Blooming Gen-X Weirdo. 

Still, the writing was very hard. I continued to stall. The book was supposed to come out in the spring of 2021, but I remained too anxious. I felt as if I needed to declaw so much of what I’d written. And so I did. I put the manuscript through two additional rounds of my own editing—blurring the living daylights out of every single ex-partner and ex-friend; making composites of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and teachers by assigning some of their more regrettable choices to “the adults around me” (I mean, I grew up in the ’70s, when adults were pulling some crazy shit); culling unnecessary details about my parents’ personal lives.

I was about to give my book the second of those serious haircuts when an assuring piece of mail arrived: a galley of Melissa’s Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. In a chapter called “A Big Shitty Party,” she expounds on the kernels of ideas she offered at AWP in 2019—about the great power a memoirist has, much greater than that of her subjects, and the responsibility that comes with that power. (It was a special thrill to see her refer to our conversation about “letting the writer win.”)

I felt held by the book. I kept it by my side as I put the manuscript through its second deep scrub, with benevolence in mind. And I got the job done.

When I received my father’s email, I knew I had succeeded in producing a memoir that reveals more about me than anyone else, and which tells my story, warts and all, in a way that my family can get behind. (He asked for only one change: I’d gotten wrong the age his mother was when she died.)

So, yeah, it turns out my mom loves the book, too, as does my hilarious sister, who texted, “Omg, your book is so funny!” (Big score.) It’s all such an enormous weight off my shoulders. To think that I’d been putting this off for so long.

P.S. My dad accidentally cc’d his friend Frank on that email. I only hope Frank was as moved as I was.

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This essay was originally published in Memoir Land in October, 2023. An earlier version was published by Catapult in June, 2022. Editor: Stella Cabot Wilson