I talk to a lot of people who want so badly to write a memoir but are plagued by all kinds of fears about what could happen if they do. This is understandable. But often, I find that the dangers of writing a memoir are more of a “you don’t know what you don’t know” issue than a sign that writing the book itself is actually unsafe.
In fact, I recently learned that “dangers of writing a memoir” is a fairly common search term, which tells me this is an even bigger issue than I see personally with the writers I work with. And I suspect I know at least part of the reason.
Whenever we really want to do something that could make us vulnerable, there are a lot of ways we can try to talk ourselves out of it. Staying where we are will almost always feel safer to our nervous systems than stepping into something new. Writing a memoir asks you to dig into your experiences, your philosophy, and your wisdom, and on top of all that, most memoirists are trying to write a whole book for the first time. Of course that is going to feel a little strange.
Sometimes what we call fear is really anticipation. We know we are about to do something important, something unfamiliar, and our bodies respond accordingly. If you are writing your first memoir, I have talked more about what you can realistically expect from the process.
But I think something else happens too. When we are considering doing something that will push us outside our comfort zones, we naturally start looking for reasons not to do it. And the most convincing reasons are the ones that are based on things that really could happen.
Could somebody sue you over a memoir? Yes.
Could someone in your family get angry? Absolutely.
Could you get scammed while trying to publish or promote the book? Unfortunately, yes.
These are real possibilities. But after working with dozens—probably hundreds at this point—of first-time authors, I can tell you that most of the dangers of writing a memoir that people worry about happen far less often than the fear would suggest.
There is one exception. We’ll get to that one at the end.
Before we do, I want you to keep checking in with yourself as we move through this list. Are you gathering useful information about a legitimate concern? Or are you looking for a sufficiently convincing reason to put off something you already know you want to do?
Because those are very different problems.
Danger #1: You Could Get Sued for Writing Your Memoir
Let’s go ahead and start with the one everybody is thinking about.
Yes, one of the possible dangers of writing a memoir is getting sued.
It does happen. And depending on the story you are telling, it may be something you need to take seriously. But I also want to give you some perspective: I have never, knock on wood, personally worked with an author who ended up being sued over their book.
I have met authors at Page & Podium events who have been sued or whose family members threatened to sue them in an attempt to suppress a book. So I do not want to tell you this danger never materializes. It does. But most memoirists I meet are much more afraid of being sued than their individual circumstances warrant.
Before I go further: I am not a lawyer, and none of this is legal advice. If your book raises serious legal concerns, talk with a literary attorney.
One resource I mention in the episode is Thea Rademacher’s Authors Beware. Rodemaker is a former attorney and publisher, and the book is designed specifically to help authors understand legal and business issues around publishing. If you have significant legal concerns, though, a book is not a substitute for individualized advice.
One misunderstanding I hear surprisingly often is that you can simply change someone’s name and protect yourself.
The thinking makes intuitive sense. If I call the person “Bob” instead of using his real name, how could I be defaming him?
But changing a name does not necessarily make somebody unidentifiable. Imagine that you are writing about an abusive former spouse and you have only ever been married once. Calling him Bob does not prevent the people who know you—or him—from recognizing who you mean.
The same issue comes up when memoirists consider simply turning a true story into fiction. A fictional label or changed names do not automatically eliminate all possible legal concerns.
So if getting sued is a serious concern for your particular memoir, I would much rather see you get good information than spend the next three years anxiously Googling. Find a literary attorney who can look at the actual manuscript and the actual circumstances. The Independent Book Publishers Association also maintains directories that can help publishing professionals find specialized service providers.
Then, once you have the information you need, check in with yourself again.
Are you afraid of the legal risk you have actually identified?
Or are you afraid of writing the memoir?
Because if it is the latter, you can spend a very long time trying to solve the wrong problem.
Danger #2: Your Memoir Could Hurt a Relationship
This is probably the fear I hear about most often after lawsuits: What if somebody I love reads the book and gets angry?
I cannot promise you that will never happen.
Memoir requires conflict. If somebody bullied you, mistreated you, abandoned you, undermined you, or simply made a difficult period of your life harder, completely erasing that behavior can also erase your experience of what happened.
At the same time, most memoirists I work with are not trying to write revenge books. They do not want to play the victim, and they do not want to flatten another human being into a cartoon villain. Usually, the point of the book is to show how the author moved through something difficult and changed because of it.
That makes writing the people who hurt us a real balancing act. I have a whole piece on how to write your memoir’s villain without burning bridges, and we have also talked specifically about how to talk to family members about your memoir.
But there is one option I especially want you to keep in your back pocket: you can let people read the relevant sections before publication.
That does not mean everybody mentioned in your book gets editorial approval.
And obviously, this advice does not apply across the board. If you are writing about an abusive ex-spouse, for example, contacting that person and sending them your manuscript may be unsafe or deeply unwise. You know your relationships and circumstances better than I do.
But many memoir relationships fall into a much grayer area. Maybe somebody did not treat you especially well at a particular moment. Or they worked for an organization that harmed you. Maybe they made a decision you disagreed with. They might have been part of the conflict without being an irredeemably awful human being.
One of my favorite examples comes from Wendy Davis’s memoir The Fight You Don’t See. As we moved through editorial and production, Wendy went through the manuscript and identified the places where she discussed other people’s behavior or words. Then, where it made sense, she met with those people, showed them what she had written, and asked for their feedback.
That did not mean they got to rewrite her story. As I recall, she did not make substantive changes as a result of those conversations.
But she was no longer waiting for publication day wondering which relationships were about to blow up.
Sometimes those conversations can even make a relationship stronger because you have finally talked openly about something that both people already knew happened.
There are also craft choices that can help tremendously. If you are struggling to portray someone fairly without sanitizing what happened, thinking of the people in your memoir as characters can help you separate the narrative job they are doing from your entire real-life relationship with them.
And importantly, most of this is not something you have to solve before you write page one.
Write the story first. You will have opportunities during revision, editing, legal review, and pre-publication conversations to decide exactly what belongs in the final book.
Danger #3: You Could Get Scammed
The third of the dangers of writing a memoir is one that applies to authors of every genre: you can get scammed.
Author scams are particularly sinister because they are designed to hit writers directly at the intersection of their hopes and insecurities.
You have spent years writing a book. Of course, you want people to read it. You may have no idea what is normal in publishing. Then somebody emails to tell you that they can put you on television, make you a bestseller, sell thousands of copies, get Hollywood interested, or run a marketing campaign that requires absolutely nothing from you.
That can sound awfully good.
We have covered common publishing and ghostwriting scams in much more detail before. But the scams I see memoir writers fall for most often are related to promotion.
One common version is the mysterious television opportunity. Somebody contacts you and says they want to feature you or your book on a television show. It is usually not a show you recognize, which is actually part of why the pitch can work so well. If someone says Oprah wants you tomorrow, you know something is wrong. But some program you have never heard of? Maybe it is legitimate.
Then comes the fee.
Yes, they may technically put you on a “show,” but you are paying a large amount of money to appear somewhere with little or no meaningful audience. That is not the earned-media opportunity the original pitch encouraged you to imagine.
Another very common version involves advertising. A company tells you that you do not have to do anything: they will run ads, promote your book, and generate a huge number of sales.
Be very, very suspicious.
Especially for nonfiction and memoir, the author is part of what sells the book. Readers want to know who you are, why your story matters, and why they should trust you to guide them through it. You can hire excellent people to help with advertising, publicity, strategy, and execution, but nobody can completely outsource you from the marketing of your own nonfiction book.
A useful rule of thumb is the boring one: if someone is promising something that sounds too good to be true, slow down.
Do not let urgency make the decision for you.
Look up the company. Talk with other authors. Ask what exactly you are buying. Ask for specific deliverables instead of vague promises about “exposure.” And before handing over a large sum of money, have somebody who actually understands publishing take a look.
This is also one reason we are putting more publishing-industry information into the Page & Podium newsletter. Scams evolve, and the more authors understand what ordinary publishing services actually look like, the harder they are to manipulate.
Danger #4: Writing Your Memoir May Force You to Change
This one sounds a little cheeky, but I mean it.
Writing your memoir may make it very difficult to continue behaving in ways you already suspected were not especially good for you.
All of us have patterns and habits that have somehow managed to fly under our own radar. Even self-reflective people do. Even people who have spent years in therapy do.
Then you write 70,000 words about yourself.
Suddenly, some of those patterns become very hard to miss.
I had this happen while writing my own memoir. There is an important scene in the book where I am preparing for a difficult conversation with somebody I worked with. I knew the conversation was unlikely to go well, and I was right. He was not especially interested in having the conversation and had a temper, so I became extremely focused on figuring out how to manage the interaction.
And I mean extremely focused.
I talked with my therapist about what to do if he had an outburst. Googled possible strategies. I anticipated different ways the conversation could go wrong. My desk was covered in careful notes I could glance at while we talked so I would not get knocked off track.
I was trying very, very hard to manage his emotions.
Years later, I wrote the scene.
There is something deeply obnoxious about having your own behavior laid out in front of you in narrative form. You know what you did, obviously. You were there. But when you have to describe the sequence—then I did this, then I did this, then I did this—you can suddenly see the pattern differently.
A few weeks after writing that chapter, I needed to have another difficult conversation with someone I cared very much about. And wouldn’t you know it, my first impulse was almost exactly the same.
I started gathering information and started strategizing. I started trying to figure out how to manage the heck out of the conversation.
And then I caught myself.
Amanda. Knock it off.
Having written the earlier experience made the pattern so clear that suddenly I could not tolerate doing the same thing again.
Was changing it comfortable? Absolutely not. That impulse to manage another person’s emotions had functioned as a kind of safety blanket. Taking it away meant I had to walk into the conversation without knowing exactly what would happen.
But by that point, staying inside the old pattern had become more uncomfortable than trying something new.
That is one of the stranger dangers of writing a memoir: you can become a much less reliable narrator of your own excuses.
Writing makes you slow down and articulate what you did, what you believed, what happened next, and what changed. Good memoir structure depends on that movement through conflict and change; it is part of what turns a collection of memories into an actual story. We talk about that extensively in our overview of what makes a memoir work and in the lessons I learned while outlining my own memoir.
Sometimes the growth you discover on the page starts demanding something from the person sitting at the keyboard.
Danger #5: You Will Talk Yourself Out of Writing the Memoir
Of all five dangers of writing a memoir, this is the only one I see constantly.
You get so worried about what might happen that you never start the book.
And if you found this article because you literally searched “dangers of writing a memoir,” I want to say this directly because it may be the tough love you need to hear.
None of the first four dangers becomes meaningfully safer simply because you spend another year thinking about them.
The legal issues that apply to your story will still exist.
Your relationships will still be your relationships.
Publishing scammers will still exist.
And yes, writing reflectively about your life may still teach you some things about yourself that you cannot unknow.
Waiting does not automatically solve any of those things.
But it absolutely can prevent you from writing the book.
I see this dynamic over and over with memoir writers who are stuck. Sometimes the problem looks like writer’s block, perfectionism, endless research, or a constant urge to restart. We have talked before about the psychological reason memoirs get stuck and about strategies for getting through memoir writer’s block.
But sometimes you are simply scared.
That does not mean you are making a bad decision by moving forward.
If the idea of writing this memoir has been lingering for years—if it keeps coming back no matter how many times you decide you are too busy, too afraid, or not ready—it is probably worth acknowledging that not writing it is causing discomfort too.
I think this is often the point where people finally begin.
Writing the memoir feels scary.
Not writing it has started to feel worse.
How to Think About the Dangers of Writing a Memoir
I am not interested in telling you there is no risk.
There is risk in putting a true story into the world. Yes, there can be legal considerations. There are relationships to navigate. Predatory companies do target authors. And the work itself can change the way you understand your own life.
The answer is not to pretend those things do not exist.
The answer is to learn enough about them that you can tell the difference between a problem you actually need to solve and a fear that is helping you postpone the book.
Get legal advice if you need legal advice.
Think carefully about how you portray other people.
Learn what legitimate publishing and marketing services actually look like.
Give yourself support for the personal work that writing may bring up.
And then write.
Because there is no way to complete a memoir without eventually accepting some uncertainty.
If uncertainty about the process is part of what is keeping you stuck, start by giving yourself a map. Our Memoir Method Checklist walks through the full process from idea through publication, and our posts on the seven steps for outlining a memoir, the anatomy of a strong memoir outline, and whether you really need to outline your memoir can help you understand what those early stages actually involve.
And if you are ready to build the structure itself, the Memoir Method 7-Step Structure Sequence is now available as a self-guided course. It walks you through shaping your experiences into a compelling narrative arc and gives you a writing plan so you know what you are doing when you sit down to draft.
Remember, at the end of the day, the most common danger is that you will talk yourself out of something that could change your life for the better.
