By Meredith Resnick
Before I began writing professionally, I was a therapist. (I hold a license in clinical social work.) Therapists are dedicated to confidentiality—protecting the privacy of clients and patients, individuals who trust you with personal details of their lives.
So how do I reconcile writing essays that include people I care about so that they will feel comfortable reading them—and I will feel okay if they read them, too?
How do I maintain others’ privacy as I write about finding my own truth and a larger universal truth, especially when those people I mention in the essay helped me find it?
Here are my guidelines.
Keep the focus on myself. Having this ground rule has given me more freedom to write than I ever could have imagined. I’m a work in progress—they’ll always be plenty to discover and improve about me, so I’m guaranteed never running out of material. I focus on myself, on the lessons I learned—about me.
Grasp the deeper meaning and higher purpose of “The Essay.” After studying the personal essay with masters like Lori Gottlieb, Andrea King Collier and Beth Levine, this is the [somewhat] distilled definition of the personal essay I live by, based on what I learned from them (prepare for a long sentence!): It’s a true story that utilizes select personal details from my life, to reveal a lesson I learned that deepened my understanding of myself, that proceeds to reveal a greater, wider universal truth beyond me. So, it’s about me, but it’s also not about me (that's the universal truth part).
No gossip. I don’t “write” behind someone’s back meaning I don’t reveal personal details, confidences, etc that could be humiliating or just too tender or raw, no matter how compelling.
Specifics about me; generalities about them. If I’m going to write an expose, it should be about me, not them.
Ask myself: Is this my story?
View the other person as a gift that contributed to my insight. I might not have learned a lesson or reality about myself had this person not been in my life. Keep the focus on that and handle that “gift giver” gently. For me, this goes for a person living or deceased.
The relationship comes first. I place the relationship, rather than the story of the relationship, as the priority.
Tell my story, not theirs. This means when I’m writing something that includes my kids, my husband, my friend, I do my very best to frame the anecdote to reveal how they enabled/allowed/encouraged me (whether they realized it or not) to find my truth.
The discomfort test. If a person mentioned in the essay reads the essay, the only reason I would want to feel discomfort would be with what I reveal about myself—not what I mention about them.
Lay-my-head-on-the-pillow test. If a piece I’m writing is causing me so much anxiety and fear that I can’t sleep, I put it aside and reevaluate in a day, week, month or year. Sometimes I’m anxious because I’m working the meaning of a situation out, other times I’m anxious because I know in my gut that the personal essay or memoir format is not an option for a particular story, because the details about someone else are way too personal. (Which is why I’m just beginning to figure out what fiction writing is all about!)
What are your guidelines?
Meredith Resnick’s essays have appeared in Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, JAMA, The Complete Book of Aunts and many others publications. She the author of Adoption Stories at Psychology Today and the Older Parents column, coming soon to The Faster Times. She is the creator of The Writer’s [Inner] Journey.