Invasion Of The Biography Snatchers

I'm a 32-year-old lesbian and an aspiring fiction writer. I use my life in my work, but my girlfriend gets mad when she shows up in it. I think she's being unfair. Isn't anything I experience fair game?

--Storyteller

There she is crying, and you're rubbing her back, all "Baby, that's terrible." And then you duck out of the room and dictate everything you can remember into your phone. Um, no. Think of the details of your girlfriend's life like some stranger's lunch. The fact that their cheeseburger is within your reach doesn't mean you get to grab it and be all "Mine! Yummeee!" As Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren explained in an 1890 Harvard Law Review article on privacy, unless somebody is a public figure, they have a right to privacy, meaning the right to control who gets to know what about their persona and private life. You cross the line from fiction writer to privacy invader when a character is recognizable as a particular person. It isn't that you can't use anything at all from another person's life. Publishing expert Jane Friedman says you can create a composite character "with traits and characteristics culled from several people." In other words, steal from the many instead of "the one." Remember, it's called an "intimate relationship" because it's supposed to be between two people -- not two people and the 8,423 others one of them gave their novel away to on Goodreads.