after reading "Repeat After Me"

 I don't show my family the things that I write about them. You can never catch someone perfectly and set them out in words; people are too big for that, too detailed and contradictory. And there's always the thought that if you do manage it, if you get a word portrait or a fragment of one that is true to life (and by that I mean that it accurately represents your own view of a person), the person you've drawn will read your words and either won't find himself in them or, perhaps worse, will see himself all too clearly and the relationship that existed between you will be different.
Because the relationship between you and another person (your friend or your brother or your father) is a four-way relationship, always: the person you think you are, the person you think he is, the person he thinks you are, the person you think he is. This is complicated, and so we don't think about it.
I forget that the Rachel Boylan who exists in my own mind is not the Rachel Boylan who exists in the minds of my friends, my brothers, my father. I forget that on behalf of other people, too. If I wrote about my brother and I described him to you just exactly as he is, I would only be showing you my brother as he is in my own mind. That's who he is, but only part - only one copy, one reflection - and maybe I don't want him to see that, to see my own personal copy of who he is. It would make us different people and it would make our relationship a different character in the story of the world as we see it (because relationships are characters as much as human beings are).
Maybe I just don't want to do that.
It doesn't stop me from writing about my family.
But I don't show them what I write.