Whose story is it, anyway? Ethics and interpretive authority in biographical creative nonfiction

Abstract

When a creative nonfiction story is crafted from someone else’s lived experience, striking a balance between the interpretive authority of the writer and the ethical treatment of the subject can be problematic. This paper argues that waving the usual flags about informed consent, confidentiality and anonymity is an ineffectual way of dealing with potential threats to an interviewee’s privacy, reputation and sense of self. The ethical quandaries that can arise when using lives as material for writing are discussed in the context of my own attempt to take a non-exploitative, non-maleficent, collaborative approach to the task of producing non-superficial, non-rose-tinted, nuanced accounts of home-based palliative caregiving.