Adolescence and Memory
As a writer of memoirs, I mention a lof of people in the course of my writing. As a no-name author, I've been able to do this with very few of these people even knowing they are mentioned. I have a very small readership, see. And while nothing I write is vindictive and most of the interactions I mention in my books are positive (I remember my dad saying after my first book came out that he wished he were mentioned more), I do have a relatively constant worry that people I have mentioned will discover they are mentioned and be upset with me for mentioning them.
Recently a girl I went to high school with contacted me to say she was reading my first book and loving it. I reveled in the compliment, but only for a moment, because this girl is mentioned in that book. She's mentioned most notably for hurting my tender adolescent feelings in a rather humiliating way as we began our sophomore year. I waited rather tortuously for her to get to that part in the book and scold me for outing her cruel slight, but the scolding never came. Instead I got a long and heartfelt apology from this girl for putting herself and her budding popularity ahead of loyalty and friendship.
Of course, then I felt bad for making her feel bad about this silly thing that happened twenty years ago. I'd included it because the whole point of my first book was to make it a study of the things we learn from our school years that have nothing to do with textbooks. And being an adolescent girl is a study in itself. Her slight only affected me so much because I was fifteen, acutely aware of my own lack of popularity, and vastly influenced by the overamplication of any shred of it I gained or lost. So here was this girl, my friend, apologizing for this thing that had meant so much to me then, but now hardly seemed worth mentioning. I mean, what's the protocol for that?
I told her it was ok, because it was, and that it had been a long time ago, because it had. I'd made it through high school just fine, and my life had unfolded quite nicely despite her decades-old diss. So the only thing that really mattered now was that we were back in touch, bonded not at all by circumstance--our lives could not be more different--but by the shared memories of where we were raised, the people we had known during this time, and the uncharted paths by which we each navigated our adolescent selves, hoping for acceptance.
The simple answer here is I really should be writing fiction. And believe me, if I could, I would.