What do we do when the characters in our memoirs are the people we love in our lives, especially when we don’t portray them as saints?

One writer, Pam Mandel, has this to say:

My memoir released last week (IKR!) and the thing I'd been eating my own liver over -- my mom reading it -- turned out to not be the awful experience I'd buckled up for. My book includes drugs, sex (not the sexy kind), domestic violence, bad decisions, and a clear-eyed look at the results of the apathetic parenting of the 70s. I had been wracked with dread that my mom would take it very personally and be angry with me. Through the course of writing it, the nagging voice I had to shut down was her response, though now I wonder if that wasn't my brain reframing it to play yet more silencing games. I'm not saying your people won't be mad or hurt or whatever, only that we can't know until they read the story, and we can't allow our fear of how our people are going to react stop us.

To order Pam’s book The Same River Twice from our favorite indy, Click HERE!