As Joan Didion and Janet Malcolm and many others have suggested, what writers do when they write about other people is often unconscionable. People normally don’t want you to write about them, and if you decide you’re going to do it anyway, the important thing is not to lie about it, to yourself or anyone else. At one point I was planning to write about a relationship I’d had with someone many years before. This person had been my shrink, and we ended up together. But I found out that he’d since married and had children. Knowing this changed my mind. I couldn’t be sure how what I wrote might affect his family, and that was important to me. As Elizabeth Bishop said to Lowell after she read drafts of the poems in which he included quotes from Hardwick’s letters to him, “Art just isn’t worth that much.”