Confessions and Transgressions: Ethics and Life Writing

Autobiographies have become so pervasive in bookstores that critics and reviewers tell us we live in an age of memoir. We are entranced by confession, drawn to the revelations and disclosures embedded in personal narratives. However, some of this "life writing," as the critics call it, is so disturbing that it raises compelling moral questions about the telling of private stories—our own and those of others close to us. Our shared sense that the stories of others, inextricably part of our own, represent privileged communications raises the question of whether life writing is always a form of trespass.

With the opening line of reputedly his most autobiographical novel, Dickens crystallizes the problem: "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by someone else, these pages must show." As David Copperfield unfolds, both narrator and reader come to understand the profound irony of the "or": the initially naïve protagonist becomes the man he does with and by means of the heroic others who are intimately woven through his life story. Dickens reveals the impossibility of telling only one's own story. Identity is continually formed through and within relationships, so that the freedom to tell one's own story inevitably impinges on the privacy of others. If, as Philippe Lejeune tells us, our private lives are almost always coproperty, how then should we think about an ethics of life writing, both the good it can do and the harms it can cause?

One particularly controversial recent publication in autobiography brought the ethics of life writing to the front burner of literary and social criticism. Kathryn Harrison's 1997 memoir of her four-year affair with her father met with huge sales and hostile critics. The Kiss continues to be a lightning rod for debate about psychological and moral motivations for such confessions. Harrison justifies her tale with a kind of dubious determinism that implies that the telling needed to follow the act, in the same way that the incest somehow needed to be committed. Her motivations came under vocal scrutiny, labeled by some as a conscious act of revenge. In his "Biography as Bloodsport," New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani included Harrison when he indicted the nastiness of many contemporary autobiographies and biographies for their potential harm to their subjects and others. In the same vein, child psychiatrist Robert Coles, author of The Moral Lives of Children, later recanted a laudatory blurb he had written for Harrison's memoir when he learned that she had small children who would later read and likely be harmed by her story of their grandfather.

Even when the moral purpose of writing one's life may seem exemplary to the writer, it's not always clear whether the good outweighs the damage, whether it's shrouded in fiction or not. Writers are always caught in a tension between the need to reveal and the wish to conceal. F. Scott Fitzgerald's autobiographical Tender is the Night was perhaps, of all his novels, the one closest to his heart. About Tender, Fitzgerald wrote, "Gatsby was a tour de force, but this is a confession of faith." A thinly veiled rendition of his marriage to Zelda, the story details her descent into madness. As readers, we appreciate the power and sad truth of the novel. But most of us wonder about his right to violate Zelda's privacy, with no realistic opportunity either for consent or for telling her story her own way. If our intimate relationships are akin to the confessional, we share our lives with each other in trust. "In confessing ourselves," says renowned autobiography scholar Paul John Eakin, "we inevitably confess those who have shared our life."

In Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair, published in 2001, Hilde Lindemann contributed importantly to an understanding of the ethical obligations writers have in constructing narratives of disadvantaged...