As columnists and reviewers tell us that we live in an age of memoir, life histories are commanding attention in many academic and professional disciplines, including anthropology, history, journalism, medicine and psychology, as well as literary studies. Our lives are increasingly on display in public, but the ethical issues involved in presenting such revelations remain largely unexamined. How can life writing do good, and how can it cause harm?

In The Ethics of Life Writing (Cornell University Press), edited by IU’s Paul John Eakin, 11 essays explore such questions. They focus chiefly on autobiography and biography, but their findings apply to all “life writing”—the entire class of literature in which people tell life stories.

An introduction by Eakins, the Ruth N. Halls Professor emeritus of English at IUB, provides an overview of the volume, including a section on life writing vis-à-vis privacy and the law, and an afterword that looks at the essays in relation to one another.

The essay, “Misremembering Ted Hughes,” is by Diane Middlebrook, author of the biography HER HUSBAND: Hughes & Plath, a Marriage, published last October, and the catalog for Eye Rhymes: Visual Art and Manuscripts of Sylvia Plath, an exhibit at the IU Art Museum in conjunction with a literary and commemorative symposium celebrating the 70th anniversary of Plath’s birth in 2002. It may be of particular appeal to those familiar with the extensive Plath collection at the Lilly Library in Bloomington.

Eakin’s past works include How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves; Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention, and Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography.