I wrote my memoir about intergenerational trauma, No Matter Our Wreckage, several years ago. Once finished, I put it in a drawer for two years - unsure I wanted to share it with the world. I then began publishing snippets of it as essays, to see how it felt to have pieces of my private life go public. Four years after the events of the book unfolded, it was finally released in September last year. All of this is to say, I took a great deal of time checking I was ready, and preparing myself, to release my story into the wild.

If you read my book, you will learn about trauma. You will learn about some events that happened in my life - I was sexually abused as a child, my mother died relatively young. And you will get a sense of my journey in coming to terms with these things. How betrayal and love can coexist. How grief can become fear, and rip your world open. Perhaps most importantly, you will gain insights into how a person survives great loss.

But it would be a mistake to think that in reading my book, you know me. Now, or at the times in my life I wrote about. As the well-known memoirist Dani Shapiro says: "When I sit down to write out of my own circumstances it is not to make myself transparent. In fact, I am building an edifice." There is a big difference between a story that is crafted, revised and then revised some more, and a person.

As trauma memoir and life writing becomes more popular, we are seeing journalists equate the text with the person. One journalist wrote about Alan Davies' memoir: "The book is him." In my case, some inferences were made about my recovery and mental health today - years after the events, or the writing of the book, took place. But, when we step outside reviewing the text, to review the person, we can be crossing a dangerous line.

We are not reducible to the texts we write. These texts are a curated part of our lives we have chosen to share. When we cross the line into reviewing the person, we make it less safe for others to speak out about trauma. Imagine a young teenager seeing a famous comedian, or a professor, being hounded for more information, or inferences made about their mental health today. Would you speak out? Or would you decide that it isn't safe, because it doesn't look safe even when you're a successful adult?

When it comes to reading and reviewing memoir - and trauma memoir specifically - we have both a literary and social obligation to think carefully about how much we "read the person" into the text. When we make inferences about trauma survivors beyond the text, when we demand more information than they have shared, we make it less safe for others to speak out.

As I have written elsewhere, the point of trauma memoir is to show how we survive and move past trauma, not to create "trauma porn". Memoirists are entitled to withhold information. At other times, we may not have the information to give. Trauma rewires the brain. We do not encode memories in the same way as non-traumatic events. They are fragmented, and trauma survivors are often left with gaps in their memories.

As I write about in No Matter Our Wreckage, trauma stories are not linear - we force linearity onto them at times for readers, but the way they are lived, the way those experiences are remembered, are fragmented. This is the case when it comes to details of abuse, as well as other less sensitive parts of a story. The author may not have it to tell, but even if they did - what right do people have to ask? We have allowed you into some of the most private moments of our lives, is that not enough?

Without trauma-informed journalism, it becomes unsafe for trauma survivors to write their texts. Texts that are often crucial in helping other survivors understand and process their own trauma. Texts that help others speak out.