Permission: The New Memoirist and The Courage to Create by Elissa Altman
Godine, 2025
If there’s one fact I’ve gleaned from every creative nonfiction workshop I’ve ever taken, as well as from countless conversations with memoirists, it’s this: nothing muzzles writers more than the paralyzing, shame-fueled fear of the ramifications of telling their truth. No questions arise more often in any gathering of writers than these: Do I have the right to tell my story? What might happen if I divulge inconvenient truths?
Anne Lamott famously offered a simple prescription: “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” However true it may be, it’s advice that’s difficult to follow, because the problem is more nuanced.
In Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create, three-time memoirist Elissa Altman untangles the complexities of this “moral minefield” in a profoundly thoughtful and compassionate exploration of the ownership of stories and the ethics of personal storytelling. As a longtime teacher of memoir, she’s well aware that many narratives never see the light of day because aspiring storytellers have been coerced into silence or remain hamstrung by fears they cannot face. And while she probes the consequences of revealing personal history, she’s mindful, too, of the soul-crushing toll of failing to do so.
Her inspiration for the book stemmed from lived experience, and her clarity on the subject was earned at great cost. Near the end of a memoir, in a mere eight-line paragraph, she revealed a family secret she didn’t even know was a secret. The blowback was devastating—a debilitating, life-altering, and irrevocable abandonment by relatives who told her they hadn’t given her permission to tell the story, that she had no right to reveal it. It led to years of anguish and inquiry into the central question of this book: “Must artists ask permission—from families, cultures, from our own hearts and memories—to tell the stories of their own lives and the lives of their ancestors?”
Permission is her impassioned, deeply reasoned response. It’s this issue of authority, she writes, that most bedevils artists: “Beyond time, space, and money to write, permission is the single biggest hurdle that the creative—new or accomplished—faces, and often over the most mundane of issues.” Altman leads readers to understand their stories are urgent, essential, even life-sustaining. She inspires them to silence the voices that try to stifle them, cast off the shackles of shame and repression, and claim their truth.
There’s a repetitive rhythm to Altman’s prose, and it’s one that feels carefully crafted, intentional, and purposeful: the author knows the message is one virtually all writers need to hear again and again until they’re finally able, as she might say, to metabolize it and give themselves permission. It’s the same message she offers her students—that “handled with care, light and truth move creatives to a place of compassion, humility, self-knowledge, and transcendence.”
The author’s ability to empower writers to own their narratives and understand that bravery brings agency makes Permission not only highly commendable, but also one of the most consequential books for memoirists and artists of any kind.
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B.K. Jackson is a writer, editor, book coach, and founder of Severancemag.com, a magazine and community for adoptees and people who’ve experienced DNA surprises. She’s written for publications including the Los Angeles Times, HuffPost, The Sun, and WIRED. In addition to writing a memoir about family secrets, she’s editing an anthology of essays on the subject, Relative Strangers, to be published by ELJ Editions in 2026.