No, they're not all autobiographical. They may not even contain a single recognizably autobiographical element (though I think we could have a three-cocktails-and-you-feel-deep-and-smart argument about how much voice--by which I mean authorial voice--says about the speaker, and how, simply by writing what one chooses to write, one might in fact be revealing huge swathes of personal information, even if the subject matter happens to be vigilante space-puppies).
Even then, though, the author is putting him or herself onto the page in important ways--the habits the mother in the story has, say, or the speech patterns of the best friend, or the side-character's vocal disdain for disposable diapers and vaccination. Those characters are all fictional, their tics imagined, but they probably have one or more real-life models, and when those models are drawn from an author's life (and where else could they be drawn from, really? Space-puppy reports to command base?), they of necessity tell us something about the author's background, worldview, or relationships. Sometimes the mother is being modeled after a woman observed in the park, and sometimes she's Mommy Dearest, but she probably got that particular way of pinching her nose to bottle a sneeze from some (more or less) known entity.
So what's an author's responsibility to the people s/he knows?
If I give the main character my own brand of OCD (have-done), that's on me to be bothered by or not. If I give the antagonist the same general outlines as someone in my life, though, is that crossing some kind of boundary?
And then there are the even-more-thorny issues. Presumably that last casting choice wouldn't bother me, the author, much--if I made you, a real person, the antagonist, it's likely I don't think much of your opinion on the topic--but what about the mother who has the same haircut as yours, or uses a few of her signature turns of phrase? Or the fight between the couple that could have been scripted from a domestic squabble I have with my S.O.? Or the sister who's flawed in very specific--and recognizable--ways?
It's not even the high-level stuff that worries me the most (the very-obvious traits, for example), it's the small stuff--things I think are innocuous, or may not realize I stole from a friend or loved one in the first place--that may remind someone I care about of him or herself...negatively. Sometimes it's not because the stolen trait is negative that there's an issue, it's simply that it's too honest, too intimate. It's uncomfortable to look in a surface and realize, only belatedly, that it's a funhouse mirror.
So what do we authors owe the people we love? Anything? Nothing? I've had writing teachers say that you have to be okay with pissing off all the people close to you if you want to write honestly, and I think that's probably true, but is this something we should feel guilty for?
Is it something we can even avoid if we try?
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