I thought it was going to be one in a series of programmes about the family . . . anybody's family . . .

and the important things that happen within families. One unusual thing about my relationship with my family is that I wrote a memoir which I thought no one would read, but which in fact exposed my family's flaws and sorrows to a wide audience. Not many families have to put up with that. But many families do have one person who breaks a silence, or speaks out in some way, or in some way describes and defines a family which up to then had no agreed-upon identity. But a family hangs together by remaining undescribed, so that each member can see it and themselves in relation to it in whatever way suits them best. The member who disturbs this comfort is asking for trouble.

It's not even a question of keeping a family's secrets . . . though that's what's on most people's minds when they think about getting their life stories down on paper.

In a couple of months, I'll be leading a writing-in-the first-person workshop at Listowel Writers' Week and I bet that topic comes up in the first hour; how do you tell the truth about what happened to you without hurting or betraying other people? Should you change names? Should you leave the worst out? But even if you say nothing but good things about the people in your memoir, even if its tone is positive and humorous and sweet . . . like, for example, the book of autobiographical sketches by Deirdre Brady, who is a sister of my own . . . you can still get into a kind of trouble.

The writer can hardly give more than a small bit of attention to this person or that. But the person in question has always felt themselves to be large, and has a sense of their relationship with the writer as having been large and vague. It shocks them to see themselves encapsulated.

What's more, reading personal material by people you know is an uneasy business. The author doesn't seem a bit like his or her self. The author seems, frankly, a bit phony. The interesting thing is that if you read some of your own old letters you'll get the same impression of your own self. You yourself will seem faintly phony. And that's because experience is too complex to be completely described in writing, and writing is a matter of picking and choosing, and the person who's doing the writing is an abbreviated version of the whole person in real life.

Memoir is artful, however simple it may seem. Memoir edits both what it writes about and the person who writes it.

Lots of people, therefore, have a quarrel with the memoirist. But when those people are family members . . . siblings, perhaps . . .

there is rich potential for further offence.

Let's say the author describes a long and loving relationship with his or her parents.

Well, that's going to stir up demons in the brothers and sisters who feel themselves to have been less loved.

Let's say your story is the story of a determined climb to the heights of a brilliant career. Will the stay-at-home siblings feel judged by that? And what about the family habit, unconsciously designed by the group to keep everyone in their box, of designating one member as, say, a show-off, and one as a joker and one as authoritative maybe because they're the eldest and another as childlike because they're the youngest. On the page, these callous but handy abbreviations, used by the family for its own smooth operation, lose all the irony and nuance they have in conversation.

I could go on. What about the fundamental fact that no two people remember any incident in exactly the same way? That never happened. It did. It didn't. So-and-so never said that. He was my boyfriend, not yours. She never really liked you. Et cetera. And what about the reputation of the family? What about the fallout for the others, facing their neighbours and friends and in-laws and colleagues, if one member of a family strips it bare in public? Memoirists seem so selfish to the people they drag in their wake. This, no doubt, is because they are selfish . . . though that itself is only shorthand for their having a need to be heard and to shape how they are heard which is really deep and imperative, or they wouldn't risk their relationship with the most important people in their lives.

All over the world people are sitting quietly writing their memoirs as if their stories are their own. They're wrapped up in themselves.

It won't dawn on them for a long time that a family is a collective property, as well as an individual one. This is hindsight on my part, of course, but I see it now.

And I see why there wasn't a television programme on this subject on RTE last week, and why I doubt there ever will be. Recklessness can only go so far.