When our favorite writers are exposed, what do we do?

Making peace with them has more to do with making peace with ourselves

My Hero Exposed

When I was a child, we would spend hours at the public library. I was homeschooled and the library was one of the places we could spread out and exercise independence in public. I would beeline for the back corner, the YA stacks.

My friends were reading Sweet Valley High and The Babysitters Club, slim paperbacks in pastel pinks and baby blues, stories of girls our age in the real world. But my mother would inventory my stack of books before I marched up to the counter with my library card, picking and choosing what I was allowed to read. I would stack my checkout pile high with The Giver and Hatchet and The Bridge to Terabithia, but I would sit on the musty floor in the stacks and sneak chapters of Kristy, Claudia, Mary-Anne, and Stacey.

I don’t remember how or why I pulled a brand new copy of Troubling a Star off the shelves, but I remember exactly where it was and what it looked like. I remember how it felt to read this character who felt so like me, so twisted up inside, compelled by art and science and faith, who longed for adventure but loved quiet corners and her own space.

Other girls liked Elizabeth Bennet, Jo March, Anne of Green Gables, but no other character in literature has ever felt as much like me as Vicky Austin and when I found her, my life changed: I am a writer today because of Vicky Austin, because Madeleine L’Engle wrote her and I found her and she gave voice and reason and frame to what I felt about life as a young teen. I began collecting every book L’Engle wrote, children’s fiction, adult fiction, memoir, poetry, spirituality, and more.

After L’Engle died in 2007, a longform expose from a few years earlier resurfaced and parts of it, much like the story of the Austin family, floored me and then rooted itself in me.

My hero, my mentor, my role-model, exposed.

Controversial Memoirs

If you have your ear to the ground on the literary and memoir scene, you know about three things happening recently.

One is that the breakout memoir of 2025, The Tell—story of a wealthy woman who ‘recovers’ memories of being the victim of s*xual assault as a teenager—had the rumblings of something far worse than plagiarism of another’s work, but the plagiarism of someone’s life. There is a lawsuit against the author for stealing, embellishing, and then profiting off of a classmate’s story.

The second is around the release of Lindy West’s (author of Shrill, which was made into a Hulu series) memoir, Adult Braces, where she chronicles the process of her husband “opening up” their marriage because he wants to date other people (and already is, behind her back), which she struggles with, guilts herself about, and then finally succumbs to begrudgingly because its the only way she can keep her husband and then surprise! they become a polyamorous couple with his new (thin!) girlfriend. The press this book is getting is just awful and the throuple is not doing themselves any favors…unless…maybe that’s the point?¹

The third, is around Raynor Winn’s breakout bestseller from 2018, The Salt Path. The book sold well over the past near decade and then, when a film released about it, The Observer reported that much of the memoir had been fabricated or outright lied about.

Who’s Telling the Truth?

I have always been a little bit obsessed with the truth, finding it, getting it, telling it, being believed about it. To be a liar (a thief or plagiarist of words or stories), is the worst thing I can imagine doing. I have had it done to me and it feels awful, but nowhere near as awful as if I had done it myself.

I am interested in the ways we write what seems true to us—even if it only seems true in the moment we’re writing it. Because if it feels true, isn’t it, in a sense, partially true? If I feel angry, I am angry, and therefore my feeling is true, even if the object of my anger, the story of why I’m angry, may not be? This doesn’t excuse making up stories or stealing the stories of others (a la The Tell), but it does get a little bit gnarly. Sometimes we can’t even get to the truth of something until we’ve written it through.²

It is impossible for us to separate facts from fiction if we’re trying to write truthfully because truth relies on the union of the two. It requires us to become brutally vulnerable, thin, fragile, honest, and also brutally strong, willing to say what feels unsayable, sometimes unthinkable, but still fact. None of us, though, is capable of telling the whole truth, as Marion Roach Smith, wrote in her short book (required reading for any person trying to write true stories), “While all of these experiences I chronicled are true, not one of them is the whole truth. Going for the whole truth is a fool’s errand.”³

In The Understory, I say,

The vocational call on the writer is to tell the truth as close as possible while also exercising as much poetic license as necessary (and sometimes more) to keep the identity of others and the specifics of some stories protected.

In that sense, a writer—whether of nonfiction or fiction—is going to be telling the truth and telling something of a story at the same time. That’s the tension writers must work with.

The tension a reader must work with is to be aware that it’s happening and not to hold too much against us if we write a story a little differently than they remember it or a little slant from what it really was.⁴

The point is, for the writer, we often have to write all the things and then sort through what’s true, good, and beautiful and what’s false, evil, or ugly. And sometimes that’s hard work.

However, as one of the authors linked above wrote, “Selling a memoir does not depend on its trustworthiness.” In fact, drumming up plenty of negative press these days, seems to be a marketing ploy.⁵

Wholeness is Always Made Up Of Parts

In Cynthia Zarin’s longform piece on L’Engle in The New Yorker that I reference above, she writes:

L’Engle’s children and grandchildren—who love her deeply, but with a kind of desperate frustration spliced with resentment—revile “Two-Part Invention.”Indeed, L’Engle’s family habitually refer to all her memoirs as “pure fiction,” and, conversely, consider her novels to be the most autobiographical—though to them equally invasive—of her books. (Naturally, L’Engle’s children are not the only writer’s children who feel that by using them as copy their mother or father has mortgaged their privacy.) When Josephine Jones read “Two-Part Invention,” she thought, Who the hell is she talking about? Alan Jones, the dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, who was married to Josephine for many years, told me, “The matriarch of the family is the guardian of the family narrative, and if that person is a writer . . . One of the things Madeleine used to say to me is ‘It’s true, it’s in my journals,’ which was a hilarious statement. Some of her books were good bullshit, if you don’t know the family. Spaghetti on the stove, Bach on the phonograph, that’s all true. But there was this tremendous fissure.” Maria Rooney calls “Two-Part Invention” “a lovely fairy tale.”

• Love / spliced with resentment.

• Pure / fiction.

• Spaghetti on the stove / tremendous fissure.

• In her journals / a lovely fairy tale.

Later in the article, one of her grandchildren says, “One thing I respect about Gran is that she’s seamless. She is able to put many complicated things together and make them whole.”

Zarin again: “Time, for L’Engle, is accordion-pleated. She elaborated, ‘When you bring a sheet off the line, you can’t handle it until it’s folded, and in a sense, I think, the universe can’t exist until it’s folded—or it’s a story without a book.’”

The work of writing a book and then the work of editing—leaving truth and lies alike on the cutting floor—is splicing, piecing, folding, making seamless, making whole. We’re storied people and we have to make sense of our lives and we do that by telling ourselves stories and telling those stories to others. We tell them online or in therapy or to friends or in testimonies or over drinks or in bed. We tell them slant and we tell them true, both at the same time because can’t not. We’re all doing it, all of the time, the moment we stop, we’re dead. Even those in memory care with the worst cases of dementia are still telling themselves stories, it’s how our brains survive and I fault no one it.

Even the profiting off those stories—however fissured—is part of how we make sense of the world. Maybe we don’t make millions off books, but we profit off those stories in social capital, by becoming part of communities and friendships. We tell common stories and uncommon stories, we tell them by marching in protests and by writing poems, by shopping at this store and not at that one, by reading this publication and not that book. It’s all story, all the time. Sometimes it’s true but it’s never the whole truth and never, ever objective truth.

L’Engle’s son-in-law is quoted in the piece as saying, “Think of it, the confirmed construction of the self by means of narrative. Golly, what a job.”

Well, that’s all our jobs. We’re narrating our way to our idea of wholeness.⁶

Fool’s Errands

I wonder sometimes if I should unshelf all these Madeleine L’Engle books I have accumulated over the past three decades, throw them in the bin. It’s what I would do if I had The Tell on my shelves. It’s what I still intend to do with The Salt Path, once I find it. It’s what I’ve done with some other books by other authors who were found to be plagiarists or abusers, frauds or philanderers.

But then I also think about the thousands and thousands and thousands of words I’ve written in my life, starting at age 13, starting when I finished my first Vicky Austin book. I think about the many different versions of me I have been, about the “construction of [my] self by means of narrative.” I think about the books I’ve written that I wouldn’t write today or the things I’ve said that I wouldn’t say today. I don’t think I’ve ever intentionally lied, stolen from, or plagiarized anyone ever, but I do know that I see the world differently—hopefully more wholly—than I did a year ago or a decade ago or five minutes ago. And in that way, I have written fiction perhaps more than fact, even if it was a fiction I thought or felt or believed to be fact.

I don’t think I’ve done that, but I still know I have. Because that, more than anything, is the work of the writer, to tell truth. And then tell truth about the truth we thought we told. And then to keep on doing it, even if it hurts.

When we stop doing that, we’re in danger. When the profit of the truth we thought we were telling becomes more important than making seamless, making whole, making good, well, then we’re just grifters and I can’t think of anything worse.

One of the reason Madeleine is still one of my heroes, is because I do believe that until her last breath or at least her last published work, she was trying to tell the truth. And she also knew it wasn’t the whole truth, that “the whole truth was a fool’s errand,” but by golly, she’d happily die a fool in search of it.

I’d rather be a fool than a grifter, in search of the bottom line, protector of my image, public relations for my brand, profiting off my (or others) pain. I’m learning that the hard way, the backwards way, the upside down way and it sucks, I won’t tell you otherwise. But I think—as best as I can in this moment—that it’s a true way.

Like Madeleine, though, I reserve the right to change.

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1. Full disclosure, I haven’t read either and don’t plan to. It’s for similar reasons that I haven’t read Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest memoir, All the Way to the River, in which she attempts to murder her lover after entering into a drug fueled spiral with her in the last days of her partner’s life.

2. Flannery O’Connor famously said, “I don’t know what I think until I’ve written it.”

3. The Memoir Project, Marion Roach Smith

4. The Understory, page 20

5. It has been reported that Amy Tell’s agent knew of the accusation of appropriation and still went ahead with the deal.

6. Re the chatter about West’s memoir—which mostly just sounds really sad to me, though not a lie, i.e. West really believes everything she wrote is true, even if it’s not good, not from anyone else’s vantage point. The interviews I’ve seen are heartbreaking and seem like she is in an abusive or harmful dynamic, trying to make sense of it, and wrote her way through that process, which is exactly what I try to do too. Instead of publishing it, though, someone should have cared enough to say, “Not yet. Not because the book needs work, but because you do,” and then helped her get it. Same with Gilbert’s memoir. Same with Griffin’s. Same with some other memoirs I’m thinking of that are releasing in 2026. The rush to publish things that are still very much in process in order to profit off pain…well, you know how I feel about that.