for writers of fiction. You have to make your fiction out of something. You're entitled to use your own life experiences and your responses to those experiences as raw material and your fiction is stronger for it. But there's an ethical dilemma in revealing details of other people's lives and the possibility of doing damage to real life relationships. Many writers have had to wait for Mommy or Daddy to die to write their most authentic work, and many who didn't experienced the fallout. You can camouflage, alter details, settings, etc., but you may not get away with it. And conversely, you can make things up out of whole cloth and they'll be assumed to be autobiographical anyway. Everything I've ever written has provoked responses like, "I didn't know you were adopted." (I wasn't.) Or "When did your first husband die?" (He didn't.) All that is part of the nature of fiction.
I recall a conversation with Pat Conroy, many years ago, in which he talked about how he received complaints about both being too "true" and being too "false." That characters were too obviously real-life people but a ship in the Savannah harbor was given the "wrong" name.
The only practical suggestion I can give you is that, if possible, change the gender of your character. I don't know why, but folks suspend disbelief if your pov comes from the opposite sex. Then they seem to understand that it's fiction. (??? beats me. )
Just write your story. See what happens. You're not likely to defame anyone. And it's probably going to be damned if you do and damned if you don't anyway. It's the feelings, not the facts that are most important anyway. That's the fun of it. And why good fiction, for me, is always "true."
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