And then there are the frauds. Yagoda notes that earlier generations of readers did not make the same distinction between fiction and nonfiction that we do now, but by the 19th century, they cared enough to object when someone presented himself as former captive of a Native American tribe, an escaped slave, or a sailor who survived a shipwreck off the coast of Africa when he was, in fact, not. The more polemically charged an autobiographical claim -- the testimony of former slaves relating the abuse they suffered while in bondage, for example -- the more likely it was to be challenged by political opponents (and defended by supporters). As controversial contemporary memoirists like Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu demonstrate, an autobiographer can expect rigorous scrutiny from those who don't like what she has to say -- as well as a lot of slack from those who do.

"All autobiographies are lies," said George Bernard Shaw, and Yagoda concurs, to a degree. Pointing out that most of us can't recall the exact words of conversations we had yesterday, let alone those of many years past, he writes, "all memoirs that contain dialogue -- which is to say all recent and current memoirs -- are inaccurate." Nevertheless, this does not make them utterly false. Ideally, "the dialogue in a memoir is the author's best-faith representation of what the people who were present could have/would have/might have said." Complicating the matter is the growing body of evidence that even when people are trying their damnedest to recount the precise details of some recent experience -- when they're, say, testifying under oath in court -- they get a lot of stuff wrong, often in a way that suits their own desires and needs. Unreliable and revisionist, memory, as Yagoda puts it, "is itself a creative writer."

"Memoir: A History" offers a pleasant tour through the various manifestations of the form, with Yagoda pointing out landmarks and dropping the occasional witticism or pithy insight. Over there are the memoirs of religious faith and conversion -- a major category -- and over here are the sensational death-row confessions by criminals looking to parlay their notoriety into one final payday. Eighteenth-century women of easy virtue wrote titillating accounts of their lives and loves, an especially profitable enterprise if you charge former clients to have their names kept out of it. There was a brief vogue in the 19th century for anti-Catholic "exposés" of convent life, supposedly written by former nuns. There were the travel and adventure memoirs of the early 1900s, written by people like T.E. Lawrence, and, long before Studs Terkel, a spate of first-person oral histories recorded by journalists and relating the stories of ordinary citizens and workers. A particular breed of "light autobiography," humorous and nostalgic depictions of American family life, flourished in the mid-20th century, but nowadays hardly anyone reads such titles as "The Egg & I," "Cheaper by the Dozen," and "My Sister Eileen." (Although the branch library of my childhood was full of these books, and I loved them.)

With the 1960s, this brief sunny interlude of what Yagoda calls "normative memoirs" ended in a blaze of fiery truth-telling, led by African-Americans, whose literature is founded in the urgent need to testify to the reality of black lives. Yagoda persuasively argues that there's a line of direct descent from, say, "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" to "Girl, Interrupted" and the hundreds of memoirs about child abuse, incest, mental illness, addiction, cancer and other traumas that began to appear in the 1980s. The political imperative to "speak truth to power" segued into a widespread belief in the healthful effects of defying decorum to talk freely about what were once private horrors. (Interestingly, Yagoda notes that the "extreme misery memoir" is now even more popular in the U.K. than in the U.S., "a particular and somewhat alarming British taste, like Marmite or mushy peas.")

For the most part, it's hard to quarrel with "Memoir: A History," but Yagoda does manage to slip a little controversy bait into an otherwise reasonable book. Behind much of the current kvetching about the memoir boom lies the impulse to protect the artistic supremacy of the novel. So when Yagoda writes,"fiction has become a bit like painting in the age of photography -- a novelty item that has its place in the Booker Prize/Whitney Museum high culture and in the genre-fiction/black velvet-Elvis low but is oddly absent in the middle range," he's inviting trouble and knows it.

It's true that material that writers would once have worked into fiction -- classic autobiographical first novels like "The Bell Jar" or James Agee's "A Death in the Family," for example -- will now more likely be presented as memoir. But whether such novels once occupied the whole extent of the middlebrow fictional spectrum between, say, a Booker Prize winner like Ian McEwan's "Atonement" and a Tom Clancy thriller is debatable. Besides, "Atonement" was as successful as any memoir (and more successful than most). "The Lovely Bones" sold as well as "Eat Pray Love," and probably to the same readers. Yagoda's statement about memoir usurping the novel is the sort of thing people worried about the future of literary fiction seize upon in their frequent moments of hysteria, but -- like a lot of the dicey memoirs he writes about -- it has a tenuous connection to actual fact.

More truly provocative is Yagoda's assertion that the rise of memoir shows how "authorship has been democratized"; everyone has a story to tell and who better to tell it than the one who lived it? We put less faith in expertise and objectivity, and more in what's spoken "straight from the heart." Furthermore the authenticity of a first-person account of a true story will, in many readers' minds, make up for a lack of the literary finesse required in fiction. James Frey could not find a publisher for the preening, bombastic "A Million Little Pieces" when he first attempted to sell it as a novel; marketed as a memoir, it was a hit, and continued to sell well even after he was publicly disgraced for making up many of the book's more melodramatic events.

In any given year since the blossoming of mass literacy in the 19th century, the selection of new books on the market consists of a handful of excellent works, a more sizable swath of total dreck and an ocean of the merely OK. For the past century and a half, the vast majority of merely OK authors have written novels, on the understanding that this is what serious writers ought to do. Readers liked the results more or less depending on the subject matter or style, but in general there was not a lot to distinguish these novels from each other, and in a few years they were utterly forgotten. This is the fiction that could now be losing ground to the memoir.

Is this necessarily a bad thing? As Yagoda writes, the memoir has an advantage over the novel in that "it is easier to do fairly well." For mediocre writers, it is indeed a godsend, offering them not only a greater chance of publication but also a greater likelihood of producing a decent book. Yagoda calls this "a net plus for the cause of writing." The one thing the memoir does lack is the literary novel's aura of art, but a lot of the people now writing popular memoirs wouldn't have been able to produce great novels anyway, and might have broken their hearts trying. Now, at least, they have a chance of winning some readers. Still, there's a sense that the bar has been ignominiously lowered.

The celebrated Bosnian-American novelist Aleksandar Hemon spoke for the uneasiness caused by this state of affairs when, earlier this year, he told BookForum, "I hate confessional memoirs ... Literature, to my mind, starts from some sort of personal space -- and then it has to go beyond that. Whatever experience you may have had, whatever stories you might have to tell about yourself, they have to be transformed into something that's meaningful beyond yourself. And because it's transformed at some point, it stops being about you. The person in my fiction is not my life, so we can talk about it. If it were my life, what would you have to say about it? Memoir is not subject to interpretation. That is antithetical to literature. Confessional space is solipsistic: I'm the only one there, you don't get to enter."

In fact, the opposite is the case. It's precisely when we are conscious of fictional characters as the invention of a literary author that they seem inert and fixed -- solipsistic -- to many readers, who usually don't feel entitled to quibble with the exalted creator about his choices. By contrast, the characters and events in memoirs are often, like real people and events, the subjects of energetic controversy, which makes them seem more alive. Who was to blame for the author's divorce? Was he justified in his rejection of 12-step programs? Was her mother bipolar, and how might her life have been different if she had been medicated? People who have read the same memoir can talk about this stuff for hours. The real world, after all, is available for an infinite range of interpretations, while we tend to see the products of the literary novelist's imagination as admitting only a few, and most of those are likely to be detached and aesthetic rather than moral and immediate.

Both of these notions are illusions, of course. It's not the made-up aspect of literary fiction that makes it seem marmoreal and remote -- otherwise, millions of people wouldn't be discussing the entirely fictional characters on "Lost" or "Mad Men" around the water cooler or in online forums. Children and adults would not have massed in bookstores at midnight to buy the latest Harry Potter installment. Those fictions -- TV shows and children's books -- have, like the memoir, not yet acquired the official status of Art. As long as they remain at least a little disreputable, they are our size, and lovable. But make the memoir respectable, clear it of all the charges against it -- of vulgarity and commercialism and calling too much attention to itself, as well as of fraud -- and chances are that sooner or later we'll get bored of it, too.

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AP: A lot of people feel let down during the holidays.

Burroughs: Yes, I don't seek perfection in the holidays anymore so I'm less disappointed. Lower your standards a little bit. It took me many years to get that.

AP: What was your worst holiday?

Burroughs: The last chapter of the book is also the most recent. The house flooded. We almost lost the house it was so bad.

AP: Not all of your stories are gloom and doom. There's a hysterical story about waking up one morning when you were still drinking (Burroughs is a recovering alcoholic) next to a man with a Santa suit.

Burroughs: If you're me, you can wake up one morning on a beautiful bright winter day and see the sun streaming through those drapes and think, "What a gorgeous day. Look at that sunlight. I don't have drapes though do I? No, I don't. And what's that red over there? Oh, that's a Santa suit. Where might Santa be?" And, you know, there are bad holidays and then there's waking up at the Waldorf Astoria in New York next to Santa. And not knowing how you got there and kind of wishing that you saw handcuffs when you looked down because at least that would imply you had been forced.

AP: You've had a very unique life. Why reveal such personal stories that people might want to keep quiet?

Burroughs: I've had a lot of very odd or unusual experiences but I'm not odd and I never wanted them, so I react the way I do, which is not unlike how you might. You just might be a little smarter and not get yourself in the situation in the first place.

AP: You write these revealing books but are you the guy in your group of friends who always has a story to share?

Burroughs: No. I'm more reserved. I spend a lot of time alone... The people close to me don't even think about the books. Some of them have never read them.

AP: Do they worry they'll end up in your books?

Burroughs: People end up in my books because it's a story about me. It's my story and they were in it. But I've been in many situations where people around me are involved with something that I'd desperately like to write about but I can't because technically it would be like shoplifting. It would feel like wearing someone else's clothes.

AP: Do you know what your next book will be?

Burroughs: I do. It's something that will be very useful and is something I was born to write. I know what the next few will be but they could be a decade away. I don't know that I'll keep writing books. I'll always write, but I don't know that I'll do it always. That's not to say I won't or I'm thinking about it. I just don't know for how long I will.

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On the Net:

http://www.augusten.com

Salon recently obtained this private diary, which we publish here in excerpted form.

 July 30

I'm standing in a conference room at the Hotel Del, when in she walks. I know Danny (and a thousand others) are going to ask me what it was like to finally meet her. In a word: weird. She's shorter than I thought she'd be, her head is larger, but her features are so familiar that staring at her is like déjà vu.

The room is supposed to be private, but obviously someone leaked, and before we can even be properly introduced, there's a mob outside. One guy has photos of aborted fetuses he wants her to sign for Operation Rescue. Another guy, in a golf shirt, yells, "The magic Negro is making my money disappear, Sarah!" An elderly woman is weeping, pleading for SP to sign a photo for her grandson, who was wounded in Afghanistan.

For a second I think she's going to sign one of the fetus photos for the woman, which seems somehow inappropriate. But then an aide hands her an official portrait, and she ushers the grandma into a quiet corner so they can talk.

I think maybe she's putting on a show for me. Then I realize: This is really just her life, ministering to those in tribulation over the dark turns our country has taken. She can no more turn away from her flock than He did.

Someone yells, "When are we going to get our country back?"

"How bout 2012?" SP says, and the crowd erupts.

Lars, her security chief, is furious. He hustles her toward the freight elevator.

"Oh my," she murmurs. "Did I just go rogue again?"

Aug. 2

Before we start the formal interview process, I can't stop myself from asking her: Why me? Why not some bigger, more established name, a Robert Lindsey or Mark Salter? SP takes a sip of her energy drink and narrows her eyes.

"If I'd wanted a company man," she says, "I'd have hired one. Lindsey would have given his left nut -- excuse my French -- to be sitting in that chair. But I want someone who gets it. Who gets that abortion kills more people in this country than cancer, who gets that the Bible is history, that we didn't just tumble out of the trees and start walking upright. I wanted someone, Lynn, who gets that God isn't the spare tire. He's the steering wheel."

I feel a dizzy jolt in my chest. "Wait a second," I say. "Have you been reading the inspirational quotes on my blog?"

Aug. 4

The lawyers want to talk structure. Won't everything be easier if we have a plan in place? "That's not really how I work," I say. "For me, it's more about stories." SP gazes at me for a moment, then banishes the lawyers.

We order in from Outback, move out to the balcony to eat. We can see the dunes, the palm trees, the golf course. SP starts telling me about the lean years, after the elopement. "We didn't have any money for some elitist wedding. I spent four years pulling fish guts with Todd, feeding the babies with that stink still on me. That's something these affirmative action trust-fund whiners will never understand. They don't know what it's like to build yourself up from nothing, one reeking hope at a time."

Silence.

"Those who speak so cruelly about me," she says softly, "about my motives -- they don't have the first idea who I really am." Suddenly, SP turns to face me and places her hand over her heart. "The thing we gotta do, Lynn Vincent, is transfer what's in here --" She lifts her hand from her heart and lowers it onto mine -- "over here." Her huge, beautiful face is hovering in front of mine and I can smell the blooming onion on her breath and I realize, with a start, that if you were on the ground below, some stranger watching us in the dark, we might look like sisters about to embrace.

Aug. 6

On her dad, Charlie, a science teacher: "One day, on the way home from church, I was maybe 8, I said, ‘Daddy, if we have God watching over us, why do we need science? And Daddy says, ‘Honey, it's up to us to help God.'"

Aug. 8

SP asks about my hitch with the Navy. She seems a little disappointed when I tell her that I was not actually trained as a Seal. I did on-base stuff at Miramar, mostly air traffic control. "That's my one big regret," she says, "that I never took up arms in defense of this country. I guess I was too busy being a mom."

I tell her there are lots of ways to defend the homeland, that the Navy isn't necessarily the most devout organization anyway. They've been sh*tcanning chaplains for daring to preach the Gospels. Plus all these radical gays. "As commander in chief you'd have something to say about that," I say.

"Yeah," she says. "But what I'd really like is to fire some large munitions."

Aug. 12

SP calls at 10 and asks me to swing by. The kids are down. Todd's out doing paint ball (he's joined a league already, somehow). I get the feeling she's lonely.

I find her in her bathrobe, swigging from an energy drink the size of a pony keg.

"Would it be all right if we had wine?" I ask.

"Heck, yeah," she says, and pulls out a case of shiraz some donor dropped off.

We work our way through a bottle and talk off-shore drilling and the Pauline Epistles and that somehow gets us onto pilates and whether it's a Spanish word, or Italian. We're eating olives and brie and at some point I hear this polite little fart.

"Was that you?" I say.

"Don't ask, don't smell," SP responds.

We both crack up.

But then Trig starts fussing, and Piper wakes up sniffling about a bad dream, and SP hurries into their room, in full mommy mode. I can hear her quieting the girl. ("No, honey, Joe Biden is not hiding in your closet. See? Look -- no Joe Biden. Just shoes.")

Trig starts bawling and she makes him a bottle and combs out Piper's hair. I step onto the balcony and watch this tableaux. It's the strangest sensation, like I'm having a vision of America as the Promised Land, the pool below glowing blue and the smell of French fries drifting in from somewhere and the murmur of the TVs pulsing from the rooms all around us, the warm bustle of the grid alight. And SP at the center of all this, steadfast, tireless, a media-age matriarch daring to stand against the calm murderers of the unborn, the catamites and mongrels, against the cruel voices who seek to damn us for our prosperity, for the simple crime of having been born on the right side of God.

Aug. 13

OK. Major hangover.

Aug. 16

SP calls on an urgent matter. Someone has told her that Rachel Maddow is a lesbo. "Is this true, Lynn?"

"I'm afraid so," I say.

I hear her gulp her energy drink. "Wait a second," she says. "Do her bosses know?"

Aug. 18

SP in no mood to talk. Saw Levi running his mouth on cable. Someone's hacked her Facebook page. Then Todd shows up with paint all over his shoes, and she loses it. "Decompression time," she says. We head out to the shooting range. SP has her own sidearm holster (stitched leather, a gift, reported) and her own weapon (big, purchased at Wasilla County Fair).

I hold Trig while she works through a round, methodical, squinting, her cheeks spiraling with blood. Magnum therapy, she calls it. After, she has me touch the hot barrel. "You recognize that feeling, Lynn? That's freedom." Then she hustles Trig out to the parking lot to stop his crying.

Aug. 20

Just for giggles, we YouTube her sportscaster clips. That hair!

"And to think," SP says, "I once dreamed of blowing Keith Olbermann."

I think I'm going to be sick.

Aug. 15

SP on polls: "A person with God on her side is always in the majority."

Aug. 16

Campaign rehash last night. SP says they were treated like hicks. "The whole sickness in America is people looking down on us," she says. "That's why the media didn't like me. Because I wouldn't bend over like most politicians and take it. Todd is still livid about the speech she wanted to give on election night.

He's screaming and gesturing with his beer when Piper pads in from the TV room, rubbing her eyes.

"Glenn Beck's crying again," she says. "Why is he always crying, Mommy?"

SP gathers her into a hug. "He's crying because it hurts to love your country so much."

Aug. 22

"Oh, here's a story," SP says. "I remember this one night when daddy was helping me with the cross-country team. I was doing 440 sprints, ‘lung scrapers' they're called. Did 10 straights until I fell down and puked on the track and daddy came over and touched my cheek and said, 'It's OK, baby girl. Just two more. God never gives you more than you can handle.'" Then she starts tearing up.

"You OK?" I say.

"People need to understand I'm not giving up, Lynn. Ever."

"What about the governorship?" I say quietly.

"Come on, now," she replies. "You know better than that. If I wanted to serve the Pharisees, I'd serve the Pharisees. My work is with Him now."

Aug. 28

Back from meeting the editors. They have that shallow NYC confidence. The happy scripture of marketing. SP lets them talk and talk and talk. Then she stares at the head guy Jonathan and says, "No offense, Jonathan. But this is going to be a book for people who pray."

Sept. 2

SP returns to AK tomorrow. A very emotional final session for the book. She keeps wanting to talk about her children. She weeps to think of them inheriting a fallen world. This is what drives her: the possibility of every precious life redeemed. She uses the phrase again and again. Before I head home, we kneel together in prayer.

“You know what I dream sometimes?” she whispers. “I dream that all of my children will someday be able to walk the streets of this land without fear in their hearts." She hugs me with an almost violent sense of conviction. "In my America, the one I hope to build, I honestly believe that could happen."

The redeeming face of what, now? You don't need to be a pro-choice absolutist to be put off by this language; for one thing, it's dispiritingly similar to the countless other memoirs of addiction and trauma on the market. For another -- and here's where fellow pro-choice absolutists may recoil -- it recalls the rhetoric of antiabortion activists who paint women who abort pregnancies as damaged and victimized.

Yet Vilar identifies as pro-choice. “I wish to stand as representative of women who have remained silent,” she writes.  And therein lies the problem.

There's little doubt that Vilar's pain is real. She's written, in the past, about her mother's suicide and her own psychiatric hospitalization. This memoir apparently includes a bullying husband, self-mutilation and suicide attempts. Her history is specific, personal and -- from the sound of it -- harrowing. It should be respected. What it should not be is “representative.”

This is not a view shared by ABC News, apparently; it recently ran a story linking Vilar to other women who have “multiple abortions.” (The most frequent abortion-haver in the story, other than Vilar, had terminated only three pregnancies.) Her story taps into common fears about abortion, shared even by some pro-choicers:  That, given choice, people will have the wrong kind of abortions, or will have them for the wrong reasons, or will have too many. That -- to be blunt -- freedom really does mean freedom for everyone. Unfortunately, this is a fact of life for anyone living in a democracy. Yes, the fact that women have the right to choose abortions means that some woman can choose to have 15 of them. It also means the rest of us are free to have as few or as many as we like. Most who abort will stay in the single digits; more still will not abort at all.

Presenting Vilar as the face of women who abort is like presenting an alcoholic as the face of people who buy wine. A “steady flow of unhappiness” sells books; so do extreme behaviors. They're far from “representative,” whatever that means. 

Myerson, a well-known British novelist, has been subjected to all manner of public scrutiny lately (she likened it to a "witch burning"). This past spring, her eldest son, Jake, now 20, spoke to the British tabloids to protest his depiction in her well-publicized memoir, in which he is clearly identifiable (though she refers to him only as "the boy"), as well as in "Living With Teenagers," a column that ran in the Guardian under an anonymous byline for two years and 100 episodes and detailed the travails of his two siblings and him with enough identifying details that the people who mattered -- those who actually knew them personally -- had no problem figuring it out. Myerson drew a distinction between the two works, telling the Daily Mail that: "One is a collection of affectionate vignettes that I hoped would strike a chord with many parents and the other a serious description of what happens when skunk cannabis burns a home."

We'll get to the home-burning skunk cannabis soon enough. But even the earlier, more innocuous, allegedly anonymous column was not a lot of fun for her children. Jake says the kids at school figured it out almost immediately. They began leaving the columns on his desk at school and, according to the New York Times, gave him the charming nickname "Mr. Three Hairs" after his mother described her children's first underarm and pubic hairs in a column. But when he asked his mother if she was the author, she lied. Many, many times. According to Jake, he first asked his mother if she was the author around Episode 6. She said, "No, of course not." He asked again a year later, after he'd been kicked out of the house. "She promised she would never do that to us," he says. After that, again, according to him, she actually concocted a story about "some underhanded journalist" who must be secretly writing the column while using details of her own family and even "made a few calls" claiming to "investigate" this mysterious person.

If true, this is fucking bonkers, right? It's one thing to write about your children upfront, yet another to write about your kids under the cloak of anonymity, and something else entirely to write about your kids in a way they most certainly recognize, then claim they are the crazy ones and invent some weird cloak and dagger shit to explain it all. Myerson finally gave up the column, explaining that it "began to feel less like some kind of benign, semi-comic revenge and more like a betrayal." Anyone else wondering where to draw the line between using your position as a writer to exact "semi-comic revenge" on your children for committing the sin of being surly teenagers and "betraying" them?

This distinction matters all the more when the subject matter is not pubic hairs but the skunk that burned down the house. All the Myersons seem to agree that teenage Jake developed a fondness for weed. And they all seem to agree that all manner of ugliness ensued: fights, late nights, banishments, plants smashed on the front sidewalk. At one point Jake is said to have hit his mother hard enough to perforate her eardrum; he admits it, but says that the incident was preceded by her slapping him "eight or nine" times. The New York Times piece mentions that Jake says his mother conveniently left out the year of "marital strife" that preceded his drug use; his mom counters that "This can only ever be my story from my perspective, and all I can say is I've been as truthful as I'm capable of being."

Is Jake just your average pot-smoking adolescent, incited to rages over crappy parental behavior? Is he an addict driven to psychosis and paranoia over "skunk," a variety of weed that is, we're told, way more potent than the kinder, gentler dope associated with the Summer of Love? Who the hell knows. This is family drama at its nuttiest: accusations, cross-accusations, fear, rebellion, betrayal. But, as Jake points out, only one side thought to commit it to print and distribute it to an international audience: As he says of his parents (his father, Jonathan Myerson, is also a screenwriter, director and novelist), "They are writers, they are published, they have a voice. I don't."

His parents justify whatever violations of privacy may have occurred by appealing to the greater good of telling their story so that others may learn from it. His father defended his wife's memoir to the Daily Mail by saying, "This is cannabis. It stops you, it rips out normal reactions, normal kindness, normal motivation. It draws a line and you stand patiently behind it. And this is why we have broken one of the most serious prohibitions facing any writer: You Do Not Write About Your Children." And his wife is only one of dozens of writers who have decided their child's hellion years are worthy of memoir. The New York Times recently hosted a round table with a few of them. Michael Greenberg, who wrote about his daughter's bipolar mania in his memoir "Hurry Down Sunshine," said, "to tell a writer she has to lay off her children seems unduly restrictive" and it "seems prudish to condemn them for it."

But some of these writers admit they have taken pains to avoid unfair portrayals of their children in their work. David Sheff, who wrote "Beautiful Boy" about his son Nic's addiction to crystal meth, made sure to get his son's approval; Nic later wrote his own memoir and the two sometimes give joint interviews. Susan Cheever, who often found family secrets revealed in her father's fiction, claims she used to run bits of her family column by her children, though she also admits that she sometimes paid them in cash to let her run things they were uncomfortable with and that, as adults, they would probably describe this process as "disingenous."

All of this caution is optional, of course, and there is no rule that says writers only get to write the things that will endear them to others. "When it comes to writing about family or friends, you can be liked, or you can tell the truth," author David Matthews told the Times. "If you want both, you should become an accountant." As someone who writes (and who, not incidentally, has occasionally found little bits of myself in the work of my friends), I tend to agree. There is no rule that says you must be a nice person to be a good writer.

And yet, and yet. It is no small thing to, in Jake's word, "tar" your own kid "with the addict's brush" -- even if he is an addict -- especially when that kid is a 20-year-old, navigating landlords, friends, college admissions officers and future employers. "They are trying to suggest that they published 'The Lost Child' with such innocence, to help other families, to save other children -- treating me like I'm some kind of holy sacrifice," he says. "But they've done all this before. It's just another betrayal." I'm not saying there should be a law. I'm not saying we can't keep debating the ethical line of what is and what is not fair game in writing about one's children. But I do think that parents' ethical obligation to protect the privacy of minor children in their care -- who have little choice in how they got there -- is higher than one's obligations to friends, family, even to one's own parents (who, after all, were the adults in the room during one's childhood). And no amount of piety and appeals to a higher cause to "save" other people's children changes this simple fact: If your kid calls it a betrayal, it most certainly is.