"I write about my children. Does that make me a bad mother?"

Writing is walking a tightrope of ethics. As a writer, I place my children under a literary magnifying glass to address broader social issues. As a mother, I prefer not to do that. They are two sides of me constantly wrestling with each other. While one screams, "Only honesty makes your message urgent," the other bellows, "Not at the expense of my children."

"I want nothing more than to be loyal to my writing and to my family. But that seems an impossible task. British author Julie Myerson has also painfully learned in her career that you can't always serve both masters. Her latest novel, Nonfiction, is about a mother and her drug-addicted daughter. The story is based on her own family: she already wrote a controversial memoir about her son's addiction.

" The writing process, whether fiction or nonfiction, is (for me) about finding the most painfully honest and precise way to say something," Myerson writes in an email to literary programmer Daphne de Heer. "The painful element is crucial. It has to cost me something."