Write your own experience rather than your verdict on theirs. Show substantially featured people the actual passages before you publish, not a summary. Change identifying details rather than only names. And decide, early and consciously, which relationships you are prepared to risk — because that decision is being made either way.
How to write about real people
Before this chapter goes anywhere
Work through it for each person who features substantially. The questions are ethical as much as legal, and the ethical ones are usually the ones that keep people awake.
- Is this person identifiable to anyone who knows them? Not: is the name changed.
- Am I stating my experience, or making a factual claim about them?
- Could I demonstrate the factual claims with letters, records or a third party?
- Is any of this in a private category — health, sexuality, finances, a child?
- Does the book lose anything real if this passage goes? Answer honestly.
- Have I written them as a person, or as the role they play in my grievance?
- Would I be able to read this passage aloud to them?
- Have I shown them the actual words, not a description of them?
- If they object, do I know now what I will do?
- Is there a passage here I am including because it is true rather than because it belongs?
- Have I checked whether anyone in it was a child at the time?
A risk pass over your chapter
Send a chapter and we'll email back the passages carrying most exposure, the category each falls into and what would reduce it — plus the permission-conversation script authors find hardest to start. Not legal advice.
Write your experience, not your verdict
This is the sentence that solves most of the problem, and it improves the book at the same time.
He was a bully is a characterisation of another person, contestable and potentially actionable. I stopped speaking at dinner because I did not know which version of him would answer is your experience, unarguable, and considerably better writing.
Memoir is strongest in the first case anyway. The reader forms their own verdict, which they trust far more than yours, and you have not made a factual assertion about a third party that you may be asked to prove.
Changing details properly
If you are going to anonymise, do it seriously. Change the trade, the town, the number of children, the year, the make of the car. Combine two people into one where the book allows it.
Half-anonymising is the worst outcome: it does not protect the subject, it does not protect you, and it damages the book by making the details vague.
And add a note at the front saying what you have done — some names and identifying details have been changed — which is standard, honest, and sets reader expectations correctly.
The permission conversation
Most authors dread it and most report that it went better than expected.
How to do it: show them the actual passages, printed, not a summary and not the whole manuscript. Explain what the book is for. Ask specifically whether anything is wrong — factually wrong — and listen properly, because they often catch real errors.
Give them a deadline, kindly. I'd like to hear by the end of the month prevents an indefinite silence that becomes its own answer.
Then get the outcome in writing, even informally. An email saying I've read it and I'm happy is worth a great deal.
What you are not obliged to give them is editorial control. There is a real difference between that did not happen and I would rather you did not say that, and only the first requires you to change the text — though the second may still change your mind, and sometimes should.
When someone says no
You have four options and it is worth knowing them before the conversation rather than during it.
Cut it. Sometimes obviously right, and the book survives.
Anonymise it properly, accepting what that costs in specificity.
Publish anyway, having taken legal advice, knowing the relationship may not survive.
Delay. Some books are published after a death, and some authors decide their relationship with a living sister is worth more than the chapter. That is a legitimate literary decision, not a failure of nerve.
The only bad option is not deciding — publishing without having thought about it, and finding out in a phone call.
Where Your Book Pro fits, and where it stops
Safety Screening flags exposure early so you know what to take to a solicitor. It is not legal advice and it does not replace one.
It reads the manuscript and returns the passages most likely to carry risk, sorted by category — identifiable living people, factual allegations, private information, material involving children — with a note on what would reduce each one.
The practical value is scope. A solicitor reading 90,000 words bills for 90,000 words. A solicitor reading fourteen flagged passages and a summary bills for a great deal less, and gives you a sharper answer.
Your Book Pro is a British book-writing platform. You bring a book — an idea, a folder of notes, half a draft, or a finished manuscript written somewhere else — and it gives you the editorial process a publisher would run: a plan, structured feedback, a simulated beta read, a line edit, a proofread, a cover, a blurb and a print-ready file. You can type it, upload it or speak it. The tools sit in one place and work on the same manuscript, so the feedback compounds instead of arriving as twelve disconnected opinions.
This page is general information about how the law works in this area, written for authors. It is not legal advice and cannot be relied on as such. Defamation and privacy law is fact-specific, differs between England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and differs again outside the UK. If your book identifies a living person in a way that could damage them, take it to a solicitor who practises in publishing law before you publish.
Screen your manuscript
Upload a manuscript written anywhere
Email me the risk passQuestions people ask
- Do I need permission to write about my own family?
- Legally, not automatically — but consent is the strongest protection there is, and for anyone substantially featured it is usually both wiser and kinder. This is general information, not legal advice.
- What if my sibling remembers it differently?
- Say so on the page. Contested memory is one of the most interesting things memoir can do, and it is far safer than asserting a version you cannot demonstrate.
- Can I write about my ex-partner?
- Carefully. Divorce and family proceedings can carry their own reporting restrictions, and private information about a former partner attracts privacy protection. Take advice if the material is substantial.
- Should I show my family the manuscript?
- Show the relevant passages rather than the whole book. It is a narrower conversation, it gets a faster answer, and it avoids handing anyone an editorial veto over material that isn't about them.
- What about people who are dead?
- You cannot defame the dead in the UK, but living relatives may be identifiable through the same passage and have their own rights. Family feeling is also a real consideration that no law governs.