Naming Names

“Write what you know!”

That sentence is practically the opening imperative in every book ever written about writing.

Two members of my writers’ group have recently published hardcover books. I’m insanely jealous, but that’s not what this is about.

One of them, a minor celebrity who stirred controversy in the local papers fifteen or twenty years ago, wrote a memoir extolling the great events and loves in his life. I’ve not read it, but he says he spared no detail. So much so that six months later (he claims) his wife was still chasing him around the kitchen table with a carving knife. If it’s true, that much rancor might’ve qualified both of them for a marathon, and he’s in his seventies.

The other, a former advertising executive who claims to have known everyone from Madonna to Mother Teresa, published a novel about presidential politics in the late 1960s. Many of the characters in the story were the real people on the national scene at that time. Since most of them are dead, I suppose he doesn’t have much to fear from libel, but even so…

Neither of these writers shows the slightest compunction about revealing the intimate details of other people’s lives.

I can’t bring myself to do that.

My novels are written from life in the same way my fellow authors have used their experiences for inspiration. The difference is that I can’t include those explicit details in any way that might embarrass the people who were there with me at the time.

Example: My first novel, Red Crush, begins in 1967, in the aftermath of the Detroit riots. I was attending General Motors Institute in Flint, MI at the time. As in the story, that was when my fraternity made a panicked move from a racially mixed neighborhood to their new, but unfinished house nearer the campus. But none of the details of that actual move may be found in the novel. For one thing, I wasn’t there. For another, I feel that setting the stories in fictional Paris, Michigan and equally fictional Univers Industries provides a degree of protective camouflage for the other people touched by the events I’ve used.

Let’s face it. My real life was pretty boring. Sure, I knew about and saw things that served as a good pretext for crimes, but auto workers and executives are as exciting as melted butter. I met John Delorean, when he was a mythic rising executive, but he was long gone by the time the cocaine sting happened. I breathed his air for about thirty seconds, then he was gone.

I do this because I don’t want to leave a hint that anyone I knew, or anything I saw was either embarrassing or criminal. Only in my imagination.

A while ago, I started writing a memoir about my pilgrimage through organized religion. I have not finished it, because I wanted it to have some semblance of a plot, and it didn’t. I felt I was better off sticking to fiction.

However, in the memoir, I was confronted by the same dilemma that bounds my novels. I don’t want to embarrass anyone. The people I’ve known and worshiped with are all sincere in their beliefs, and are mostly still alive. If I published my personal observations and conclusions in the context of the facts, places and dates of their lives, my revelations might subject them to undeserved ridicule because they’ve been tarred with the brush of my cynicism.

I don’t want that.

Some of you, including my published friends, might say, “Who cares? That’s what happened. I’m simply recalling the events as I saw them.”

I believe that people have a right to retain their dignity. If I have to hide behind a pseudonym, using disguised names and locations to protect everyone else’s dignity, I guess it’s my duty to do so. If my old friends recognize themselves in my stories, it’s up to them whether they tell anyone else. I’m not going to splash their lives all over my pages.

If no one ever buys my books and reads about them, it doesn’t matter. I’ve done my duty.