But What About Mom?

By Helena de Bres

Every memoirist worries, at least a little and often a lot, about wronging their family, friends and lovers by writing about them. It’s probably impossible to create a good memoir without including people other than yourself in it. But as soon as you do that, you risk hurting, exposing, exploiting and betraying your subjects, some of whom you may deeply love.

We memoirists could just abandon the whole genre in light of these distressing facts. When encouraged by h...