Personal Honesty and Privacy

How to face the truth challenge in nonfiction storytelling

For the holiday season, I’m republishing this post so it’s free to all until the end of 2024. Next year, I’ll add other paid resources for those who are working on personal nonfiction. Please consider a paid subscription to Inside Reader as we move into 2025. We’ll need unique, thoughtful, honest voices more than ever then, and finding your own voice — insisting on it, accepting it — is one way to stay grounded in the real world.

Photo by Eilis Garvey on Unsplash

Questions: First-Person Nonfiction

• How much of a personal story is true?

• Can I mix facts with memories or imagination?

• How much do I need to reveal about myself?

Writing about your own life may seem easy at first glance. It’s based on what you know and remember, not a bunch of outside research, and — phew! — you don’t need to fact-check yourself.

Or do you?

That depends on the kind of nonfiction story you’re telling, but in my experience, the big questions listed above inevitably pop up. Trying to duck them is an instinctive flinch. I know it well, because wrestling with how honest to be in personal nonfiction can feel like it initially brings down the high of writing. It’s the equivalent of a sourpuss at a narrative party.

And yet, it doesn’t have to be. Instead, use these questions to identify the dramatic tensions in your story and to direct how you revise it for an audience. What I want to get across, especially to literary writers, is this: letting readers in on the key facts underpinning your story — who, what, where, when — spoils nothing.

Honesty about your own experiences enriches the telling and makes a personal story more credible. It’s not just a matter of hooking readers or making your “I” more fascinating. It’s about the individual and quirky places honesty will take your readers.

That may sound like a matter of faith, given the success of all sorts of influencers and other story massagers in the marketplace. I do have faith in what I’m saying, but there’s an empirical basis for it, too. I’ve worked with many writers and journalists over the years, as an editor and a teacher. I’ve observed how hard the best personal storytellers work to get the facts right and the strong impact this has on readers.

Of course, the fact slope is slippery. Many stories about ourselves are handed down, and they shift as time rolls on. You may never know all the facts or be able to verify what happened with a family member or other source.

So, you generate all sorts of material, some of it spun from imagination, some so painful you never want others to hear it. But there’s a crucial difference between the process of generating a story and sharing that story in public. And once you begin shaping a personal story for an audience, you’ll face the truth challenge.

That’s what I’m here to help you with.

Be Transparent and Vulnerable

An honest approach to first-person nonfiction starts with your intentions. Are you writing a journalistic article that includes personal anecdotes? This requires research to verify what you know. Are you writing memoir or a personal essay? There, facts may mix with memories and more imaginative material.

Think in terms of transparency. In a first-person story, you can talk directly to your audience. Being transparent about your information sources, biases, and uncertainties is more radically truthful than just checking facts. You acknowledge your subjectivity rather than attempting to sound objective.

You can be strategic as well as honest. Rather than pretending a bad thing didn’t happen, establish firm boundaries about what you’re willing to say. For example: Reader, this person hurt me, but I won’t tell you their real name or where we both grew up. That would be doing to them what they did to me.

Tell readers what you remember or imagine. Journalists focus on tracking down facts, but literary writers argue for the emotional truth of memories and poetic description as well. Memories can be uncertain but nonetheless feel true. In a review of a David Bowie biography, for instance, I frame one memory this way:

“Decades ago, I rode my bike around the suburban cul-de-sacs at dusk, listening to ‘Space Oddity.’ Maybe I had a transistor radio; maybe I just sang the words under my breath. Although I doubt this could be true, I remember being completely alone, the sky above me huge and glowing. I remember black birds disappearing into the clouds.”

I note my doubts in order to reckon honestly with what that music meant to me then. Other parts of my 2011 review are packed with factual information.

Sometimes, a first-person writer is tempted to say more than a reader wants to know. Few of us like it when somebody gets overly personal, and TMI (too much information) in first-person nonfiction is often sneered at as narcissistic. Yet such sneering can also mask traditional biases against openly expressing feelings.

Rather than implying that too much emotion is a problem, I’d frame the challenge differently: consider what you really want to say before you go public with raw feelings — but don’t be embarrassed about having feelings.

In fact, I’ve found that writers who want to get published, which always involves being judged by others, tend toward the opposite of TMI. They worry about over-sharing and feeling vulnerable if they say too much — and if they do take that risk, they may come to regret opening themselves up to judgment.

Those regrets can be potent emotional blocks. In the New York Times piece “How to Nurse a Vulnerability Hangover,” reporter Holly Burns talks with experts, such as the psychologist she refers to below, about the upside of expressing vulnerability:

“The aftermath of vulnerability may be unpleasant or surprising, but it’s frequently worth it, Dr. Seppala said. In the emotional intelligence classes she teaches at Yale University, she’s noticed ‘that the more vulnerable and real I am with my examples, the more I can communicate my message.’ Being comfortable with vulnerability’s aftereffects ‘requires courage initially, but then it’s like this muscle you build.'”

Being vulnerable connects us with others, and it’s integral to personal storytelling. If my “I” talks to readers — as I’m doing now — it offers a glimpse of why I care. I’m not just a disembodied expert telling you how to do something (or worse, an AI chatbot). Such self-disclosure is tricky to navigate, but it’s also relatable and real.

Don’t Be Tempted by Fiction

I enjoy many forms of fiction, especially novels, but as a reader, I want to know whether the events described really happened or are part of a fictional universe. Fiction allows me to imaginatively enter into other possibilities. That’s also why fictionalizing your own story can be even more tempting than TMI. It’s easy to write off real life as humdrum or constrained by actual events. Why not pump up the action?

Because it’s not true.

You’ll confront how to be truthful in every personal story you tell, and the ethical implications are important. Lying about who you are or what happened, especially to make a nonfiction story more dramatic, is wrong.

The ethics may seem obvious, except these days, they aren’t. Consider all the politicians or other public figures who now shrug off the truth, especially in digital forums, as if reality can be shaped at will. It’s also possible my exhortation sounds reductive amid the squishy internal landscape of personal storytelling. Yet the temptations of fiction — in which your “I” narrates a vivid tale — bedevil most of us. In the media, we’re constantly exposed to “true stories” that manipulate or omit crucial facts. Such stories may be entertaining but amount to fiction.

Readers do have expectations when told that a story is true. When writers bare strong feelings or family secrets, self-disclosure can move an audience. The flip side is that an emotionally appealing first-person narrator can seem sincere regardless of facts. Many nonfiction writers have gotten into trouble when they break this contract.¹

Personal stories are often based on strong beliefs, which isn’t necessarily dishonest. The real trouble comes when beliefs are passed off as facts or as “everyone knows this.” Such evasiveness is sloppy at least, failing to mention that others believe something else. At worst, it’s propaganda meant to fool or influence people.

Be Honest With Yourself

When you write on your own, making notes or in a journal, others won’t judge you instantly. Not feeling judged is a big plus in encouraging vulnerability, and it’s hard to be transparent until you’ve figured out what you want to say. This means you need a private space to be messy: to dump too much personal information, say, or to speculate wildly without facts or to rant. It also means you need to give yourself permission to write freely, before all the judges like me tell you what not to do.

If it helps, I’ll give you permission now, based on all the private writing I do: In your notes and first drafts, get it all down, with as few regrets as possible. You can edit later.

Once you’re ready to share a personal story, however, deciding what to include requires honesty with yourself as well as with readers. You’re not obligated to expose everything in your life to public scrutiny. A good story isn’t just a lot of talk about feelings, either. It conveys what you observe in the world around you. It makes connections that get across why it matters.

Developing four mental tools will guide you here:

• Self-awareness

• Active Response

• An Eye for Details

• Questioning ²

Why are you telling a story? What’s in it for you, and what’s in it for the reader? What makes you passionately curious — and are you actively responding to the world? How can you convey what you’ve observed with specific details? Should certain details stay private? Will they help readers understand or are you simply arguing your own side?

In her 2012 memoir When Women Were Birds, Terry Tempest Williams speaks to the tension between saying too much and too little: “We all have our secrets. I hold mine. To withhold words is power. But to share our words with others, openly and honestly, is also power.” Williams later adds: “Conversation is the vehicle for change. We hear our own voice in concert with another.”

Let the idea of a conversation with your ideal reader — your sister, your mother, a close friend who shares your particular passions — guide you in how much to say. Keep in mind what your reader needs to know in order to make sense of your story. Imagine the questions they might ask and start asking them of yourself.

Distinguishing between truth and fiction is crucial for authentic self-expression of all kinds. Novels are often autobiographical, but in calling something a novel, writers and publishers let readers know the events depicted shouldn’t be taken literally. The same applies for a hybrid genre like autofiction.

The nonfiction I love best overtly grapples with the truth, attributing facts but acknowledging doubts, labeling memories and wishes as the delicate things they are. My ideas about what’s true have changed over time, because life changes everyone. The insights you glean will no doubt shift, too, but aiming for truth keeps us honest.

Tips: Personal Storytelling

• You may never know all the facts.

• Tell readers what you remember or imagine.

• Real life matters — don’t write it off as “boring.”

• Ask yourself: What’s in it for you, and what’s in it for the reader?

• Remember: Truth and life keep changing.

“About to Blossom” © Martha Nichols

1. Just a few of those who have been outted for faking it: Stephen Glass, Ruth Shalit Barrett, James Frey, Michael Finkel, Jonah Lehrer — even David Sedaris and Emmanuel Carrère.

2. These mental tools are from my textbook, First-Person Journalism: A Guide to Writing Personal Nonfiction with Real Impact (Routledge). Developing the four tools will be part of upcoming writing lessons for paid subscribers.