Navigating libel in memoir writing

The whole truth and nothing but the truth?

Writing your memoir is a chance to share your truth. Your story. Your reality. You control the stories you tell and how you tell them. The central character, alongside a supporting cast. But how supportive will those other characters be about how they are represented?

We don’t know how the people in our lives will react when we tell our side of the story. And so the best thing we can do as memoirists is to be prepared.

To help you feel more prepared and to know the risks when writing your memoir, we’re going to be looking at:

The risks of telling your truth
What is libel?
How to mitigate the risks of legal action

The risks of telling your truth

Writing a memoir can feel very exposing, not just for the author, but for those in the author’s life. (It’s what makes them so damned interesting to read and healing to write.) So it’s only natural that memoirists have concerns over the effects of telling your truths.

The consequences range from being ignored at the next family dinner to being taken to court for defamation of character. Hmmm!

But let’s not get carried away. Unless you’re a whistleblower for a big corporation or are about to throw a famous person’s good reputation under the bus, there’s not much chance of your memoir resulting in a court case.

Should your memoir contain sensitive details about an identifiable person in your life or if you just want some reassurance on what’s risky and what’s not, read on.

What is libel?

Noun: Libel is a written statement which wrongly accuses someone of something, and which is therefore against the law.

Verb: To libel someone means to write or print something in a book, newspaper, or magazine which wrongly damages that person’s reputation and is therefore against the law.

(Definitions taken from Collins online dictionary)

An example of libel in memoir writing would be stating as fact that your cousin robbed a bank when you were teenagers. Or that your boss committed fraud when you were her assistant.

The only way these statements are not libelous are if they are indeed true or if the cousin and the boss were now dead. (You can’t libel a dead person.)

Invasion of privacy is similar to libel in that you open yourself up to legal retaliation by sharing intimate information about a third party who hasn’t already shared that information willingly and publicly themselves.

An example of privacy invasion in memoir writing would be sharing how your ex-husband had a sexually transmitted disease or that your sister-in-law has an open relationship with her wife.

Should someone who appears in your memoir be unmistakably identified and outed in such a way through libelous statements or invasions of privacy, what right do they have to change your words, shape your truth, silence your stories?

They can only take action against you if you have published your work; if they have read a copy of your memoir that is not yet in the public domain (ie the only copy is on your cloud) then they have no case.

If your memoir is published and available for public consumption, they could have a case if they want to pursue it.

The laws on libel differ from country to country and we Booksmiths are not in a position to advise on the intricacies of libel law. But we can share some tips on how to mitigate the risks of libel before your memoir is published.

How to mitigate the risks of legal action

However sensational or unsavoury your content, or surprising your opinions and perspective might be, it’s only natural to feel concern about how the people in (or now out) of your life will feel about what you write about them.

Here are some tips on how to treat potentially sensitive content in your memoir to avoid or reduce the likelihood of repercussions.

Use pseudonyms and change descriptions of people and places to hide people’s identity.
If making these kinds of changes isn’t enough to hide a person’s identity (say, if they’re your only brother and their place in the family is integral to the story) consider how much you need to tell that part of the story.
Give the subject of the sensitive content the chance to read your memoir (or relevant parts of it) before publishing. Giving them the opportunity to be involved in the process, give you feedback, make minor changes etc might give them as much agency as they need to feel comfortable sharing that story or give you the opportunity to explain why it’s important you tell it and how.
Use composite characters (ie an amalgamation of several different real people) to represent a certain type of person in your past, such as those in authority who put you down, those who bullied you, who treated you badly.
While opinions cannot be subject to a libel case, the difference between opinion and fact can become fuzzy, so make sure your opinions are clearly expressed as such. The words you choose, the context, how they’re interpreted and what the implications of them are, are all things you need to think about when wording an opinion. For example, use phrases that explicitly indicate a belief, like ‘It seemed to me’, ‘I thought’, ‘The way I saw it was’, ‘It could have been’.
While nobody expects what is written in dialogue to be exactly what was said at the time (who remembers conversations word for word?!), it’s always best to be extra clear about how you’ve reconstructed the exchange as best you can, with artistic licence, introducing them with phrases like, ‘The conversation went something like this’. (Real conversations are more often than not very fractured, overlapping, context-driven, reliant on body language, long winded etc, so you wouldn’t want them to be featured in a book anyway!)
Be as rigorous as you feel necessary with research and corroboration. While memoirs are by their very nature based on memory, memories are fickle things. It might suit some authors to talk to family and friends, revisit places, look through photos etc to refresh and restore some of the more shaky recollections and in turn give you a more robust recall of what happened. Just be careful not to have your own memories rewritten by other people’s seemingly contrary accounts – your remembrances are just as valid as theirs. Trust your gut.
Consider adding an About the Book section or a Disclaimer in the front matter to set out your approach to writing the book and be as transparent as possible. You could include things like how you made every attempt to anonymise certain people and locations, how you treated dialogue, how you used composite characters or name changes, how you used journals you wrote at the time and interviewed family and friends to corroborate or fill out your memories.
And if you still feel that you’re a higher risk than most for being subject to a libel case, you could employ a legal professional to vet your manuscript.

Doing all you can to set out your truth and be as transparent as possible in what’s reconstructed, opinion, and perspective, in what’s researched or loosely recalled will not only have less likelihood of leading to a libel case but will also produce a book that you can be confident in and proud of.