Mused and Abused

After my girlfriend and I split up, I wrote a creative nonfiction piece about our breakup (changing some identifying details). I published it on a popular blog and linked to it on Facebook. We’re back together, and things are great; however, she saw the story and was humiliated. I explained that what I wrote was beautiful and vulnerable and true, and many people were moved by it. She really wasn’t down with that and told me to consider her off-limits in my writing. This seems unfair. I write nonfiction. What will I write about if I can’t write about my life?

— Expressive

As lame as some creative writing exercises sound — “Write a haiku about what you had for lunch!” — a thinly veiled portrait of your chicken salad will cause way less relationship stress than “Turn your fight with your girlfriend into a blog post!” (And no, you can’t just change her name from Molly to Holly so nobody but your 546 Facebook friends will know it’s her.)

Yes, I’ve heard: privacy is reportedly dead. It was pronounced dead in 2006 at an Internet security conference. This doesn’t mean that it is actually dead or should be — just that lots of people are finding their dirty laundry uploaded to Instagram and their private conversations turned into content. Chances are, those nonchalantly ripping away others’ privacy online would be spraining their tongues tsk-tsking if somebody did it the nonvirtual way, like by hijacking the mic at an outdoor concert series: “My girlfriend, Molly … second row, that blonde in the red … FORGOT to tell me she was weapons-grade slutty in college. She’d have a tat of that McDonald’s “x million served” sign, except that there’s no room on her disturbingly small breasts.”

Like websites, relationships these days seem to require a privacy policy — one agreed upon in advance (before anybody becomes relationship-o-tainment) and maintained in the event of a breakup. Clearly, your preferred policy would be “By sharing your life with me, you agree to share it with anyone with an Internet connection.” Sorry, but the more private person gets to set the standards, and sadly, this woman only wants to be your girlfriend, not your cure for writer’s block. Yeah, I know, you’d think it’d be any woman’s dream, sitting with you in some out-of-the-way Paris cafe as you chronicle her shortcomings on your netbook.

But, wait — if you and your girlfriend have a fight and nobody comments on it on Facebook, how do you know your lives are worth living? The answer is, decide which you want more, this girlfriend or an audience. This isn’t to say you have to stop writing about her; you just don’t get to hit “publish.” Try to see this as an opportunity to expand your writerly horizons. Go do things you can write about: Climb something. Fish for marlin. Drop in on the Spanish Civil War.

And remember, everybody’s got a story, and lots of people are just dying to have theirs told. Seek them out, look deep into their eyes, and say, “So, tell me the horrors you experienced as a prisoner of war, and would you mind not leaving any participles dangling?”