Writing about real people is one of the oldest practices in literature and one of the least examined in terms of its ethics. Memoir, personal essay, journalism, biography, and much of the best narrative nonfiction depend on it. The writer who has lived a life has encountered real people, and those people are often essential to the stories worth telling. The question is not whether to write about them but how — and what obligations the act of writing creates.

These obligations are not primarily legal, though legal considerations exist. They are ethical: questions of fairness, accuracy, consent, and the power differential that exists between the writer, who controls the representation, and the subject, who does not.

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