What's fair in fiction?

It has taken me awhile to process last week’s readings. Between all of my classes, I have read three poems about the death of young children and two stories about potentially terminally ill children. Because my own kids are the reason I breathe, these texts hit me particularly close to home.  It got me thinking about the ethics of writing about death and serious illness.

With Ben Jonson’s two poems about the deaths of his first daughter and first son, biographically I know that he was writing about his own children; the poems have a special poignancy for me because of that. With the others, I don’t know if the situations were purely fictional, or based upon stories told by people they know, or if they are essentially works of non-fiction. It seems to me that if you have not actually had a child in the pediatric oncology unit, it may be insensitive to write imaginatively about that situation, especially if you receive financial compensation for it. On the other hand, you could be doing a service by giving voice to a situation that others who are enduring it may not be able to adequately articulate. If a person wrote about the experience of being a soldier in war when they had never been a soldier in war, would it seem offensive to soldiers who had actually had that atrocious experience? And would it be accurate? What about someone writing a story about labour who has never given birth?

Particularly in Lorrie Moore’s “People Like That are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk,” I felt like I questioned the reliability of the narrator because I didn’t know if the story was fictional and because she identified herself as a writer from the beginning, so I didn’t know whether to feel manipulated or genuinely touched by the text. It’s like when I read James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces while everyone still thought it was totally true and I cried while I read about the tooth-pulling-without-painkillers incident. After I found out that that part was basically made up, I felt like I wanted my tears back. I still appreciated the literary skill he displayed, but I felt cheated, and almost violated, at having my emotions played with like that. Apparently, many others were upset by his lie, too (or were we all just upset that he lied to Oprah?). Are there unspoken rules about what is okay to write about fictionally and what is not? Or is it all okay, as long as we make it clear whether it is fiction or non-fiction? Is anything off the table, or no?