People Hope To Get Judged Fairly With Their "Am I The Jerk" Stories

“My (21 F) father died when I was a teenager and my mother died 2 years ago. They met in freshman year of high school but did not start going out until junior year because my dad was my mom’s best friend’s brother.

I won’t go into too much detail because this story would be a mile long but long story short they slept together at a party and everything after that is history. Their love story reads like a romance book and for that reason, my sister (20 F) decided to turn it into one. When my mother was dying in the hospital my sister asked for her blessing to write the biography.

My mother, being who she was, said yes without any hesitation, and she died a few weeks later. My sister never went into too much detail about what exactly she asked our mother for permission to write, I don’t know if she ever disclosed any of the very personal and private details in the book.

It is important to note that my mother and father were both very popular people, my father inherited a large company from his father, and my mother was in her teens and early twenties. They weren’t nobodies who would only be remembered by this book, people knew their names.

I didn’t find out about it until pretty recently when my sister mentioned it in passing, I didn’t think much of it at the time but when she gave me a copy of it to read after she got it back from the editor, it was probably the most beautiful piece of writing that I had ever seen.

It captured their love from a narrator’s perspective and it was all completely real, with no exaggeration or added events for dramatic effect, the only creative license my sister took was to add some minor inconsequential dialogue and to put what my mother described into a third-person perspective.

Apparently, she interviewed some of their friends from high school, including my aunt (my dad’s sister and my mother’s best friend), and with my mother’s permission she read what was in my mother’s journals that she has kept religiously her entire life, she dug deep into their lives and pulled every skeleton out of their closets, yet somehow still portraying them both in a very positive light.

So far you are probably wondering why I’m even here asking for advice. It all sounds pretty amazing, right? Well, the one thing that is making me hesitate to give her permission is the fact that, like most romance novels out there, the book contains some pretty graphic scenes, all based on real facts from my mother’s journals.

She also wrote about a substance-induced event that my mother suffered in high school. She wasn’t an addict and just used occasionally with my father. My parents were always very body-positive people, so I have never been in some strange form of denial about the fact that my parents slept together, but I also don’t know if I want the entire world to know my parent’s bedroom likes and dislikes, any specific encounters that happened between them, or the mistake that my mother made that caused her to lose a pregnancy.

My sister wants my permission for her own peace of mind, she doesn’t want to publish a book that mentions my parents, and briefly me without me giving the okay.

Am I the jerk for hesitating to sign off?”