It’s Not Personal

I’ve been writing for over thirty years, and for most of that time I told myself I could never write about myself or my family, that people would have to die first. I also believed I simply wasn’t interested in my personal life as material. I preferred to invent characters from nothing. Or so I thought. After each play, once some time had passed, it became obvious that I had encoded myself into every piece. I just hadn’t known it while I was writing. Then, in 2024, my twin sister Eve died. I was bereft. Furious at the injustices of the healthcare system. And somehow, in the midst of that, I found a way into her story, which is also my story, as it is with twins.

Getting personal in your writing isn’t about bleeding on the page; that metaphor flatters the writer too much. I see it more as committing a quiet, almost embarrassing administrative error…misfiling your own life where others can see it. We talk about taking risks with our art as if sharing our dirty laundry, that exposure, is the risk. But I say the risk comes in the details. The greater the accuracy, the greater the risk. Naming the thing you’ve been strategically misremembering, the motive you’ve dressed up as virtue, the small, ungenerous truth that doesn’t improve when shared (gasp). Deep writing happens when you stop auditioning your pain for sympathy and start treating it like evidence. When you’re willing to bore yourself with precision instead of seducing readers with drama. What makes it feel dangerous is not that it’s raw, but that it’s specific. And specificity, unlike confession, leaves very little room to hide. Writing my first autobiographical work helped me to heal past and present trauma (this much, I anticipated). It helped me get honest with myself. And strangely, it showed me I could depersonalize the personal. That distance let me see things in my own memories I couldn’t access when I was still protecting them. Imagine that kind of freedom. Imagine not giving a single fuck what people think. What would you write then? If you could?