If you write about yourself, you learn how to choose which of your selves to write about. Half art, half admin, some light savagery is required as you tell the other ones to wait in the bedroom and be extremely quiet. You organise the mirrors so that readers see the correct parts in the correct light, to protect the softer selves, or those with parts still moving.
There’s a conversation happening right now about the support offered to those writing memoirs, typically people publishing their first books, writing about their most traumatic experiences, then breathing into a paper bag as their family, strangers, lawyers and the internet itself judges and pities them across 24 time zones.
