The Deadly Irony of 'Ethical' AI: My Writing Coach Preached Radical Honesty — Then Unfriended Me for Mine

I trusted him with secrets no one else on earth knew.

For ten years he was my writing coach, my memoir midwife, and so much more — a true anchor in my life, a trusted friend. We spoke on the phone or video calls as I handed over the rawest parts of my life: the fears, the failures, the things that still made me flinch in the dark. He would lean in, eyes serious, and say the same thing every time: “This is what memoir demands. The whole truth. Nothing less. Bare your soul, or don’t bother.”

He taught me so much — especially how to shape raw experience into something that could reach a reader. Our work together was the real deal. Until it wasn’t. That’s what makes the ending so confusing.

Something I posted on a Facebook thread changed everything: I was voting for Republican candidates, including Donald Trump. Not a manifesto — just sharing my thoughts and concerns about the country and the trade-offs depending on who you vote for, while encouraging genuine debate. We went back and forth. I defended my position with examples, the way people do in normal, healthy conversations. In response, he declared publicly that every Republican is racist, bigoted, morally deformed. He unfriended me and shut me out of his life. What I came to call “the divorce” was complete.

The man whose entire brand was radical honesty could not tolerate an honest declaration from the client — and friend — who had trusted him with my deepest truths.

And it didn’t stop with him. He has a huge following. Word traveled fast. Members of our writing cohort started ghosting me — one by one, the unfriending began. Another close friend I’d met through him, who became like a sister, had co-taught memoir classes with me. We shared deep life stories, late-night laughs, and real vulnerability. She “divorced” me too. My best friend abandoned me as well, though she at least had the courage to do it face-to-face after a long walk on a rainy day.

The grief of these losses has been unlike any I have ever known.

I thought I understood grief. I watched my little sister live a painful life until her death when she was only thirteen, gone a month before her fourteenth birthday. That loss had shape. It had an ending. There were rituals, tears at a funeral, a grave I could visit. This ambiguous loss — a term coined by Pauline Boss — is different. It never ends. The relationships still feel alive in my chest — memories of trust, laughter, late-night edits, shared secrets — yet the people are simply… gone. No closure. No explanation that satisfies. Just an emptiness in the air. It eats me from the inside out, a quiet, relentless hollowing that makes ordinary days feel heavy. I wake up some mornings and the absence still surprises me, like pressing on a bruise I forgot was there.

It’s even hard to remember the title of my own book project: It’s Not About Me. When a majority of my writing-world friends vanish because of politics, it feels deeply personal. The irrationality of it — the swift, total cut-off — lands like emotional abuse. I keep having to remind myself: this isn’t really about me. It feels like a symptom of something larger.

What makes the wound sharper is the staggering double standard I’ve since discovered.

This is the same coach who publicly accuses writers of plagiarism the moment they use AI to help shape their work. He insists it is theft, dishonesty, a betrayal of the sacred trust between writer and reader — making a blanket statement that any AI assistance equals plagiarism. Yet in his workshops he routinely uses best-selling memoirs as his textbook — dissecting other people’s hard-won, soul-baring pages line by line. He mines them for powerful hooks, seamless transitions, emotional arcs, and meaningful takeaways, teaching his students to study and internalize those techniques. He profits from borrowing the structure, rhythm, and craft of authors who bled for years to tell their truths — without ever calling that plagiarism.

And while preaching radical honesty from the pulpit, he quietly coached his paying clients never to disclose their use of AI. I can hear him whispering, “Publishers get twitchy… just don’t mention it.” The same man who demands unflinching truth from his students turns around and tells them to hide the very tool that helped them find their voice.

Ignorance, I’ve come to see, opens the door to fear — especially fear of the unknown. When something new arrives, it’s easy to push it away as dangerous or dishonest rather than explore what it might make possible. History is full of such transitions: calculators, for example, didn’t cause mathematicians to cry plagiarism when they changed how we solve equations; they simply became another tool in the toolbox.

And he is only one gatekeeper among many.

I have sat in those dim conference ballrooms that smell of burnt coffee and quiet desperation. The pitch sessions are timed like executions: a long banquet table lined with twenty agents, editors, and publishers wearing identical blank, dreadful looks. Writers line up like sheep behind a strip of tape on the floor, waiting to be told when to step forward. A bell dings when you have one minute left, then thirty seconds, then the final ding that herds everyone out so the next batch can shuffle in.

I still remember one editor/publisher who cut me off mid-sentence, hand raised like a stop sign to hush me, and yelled across the room to his buddy: “Hey, don’t forget the beer — I’ll be done with this soon and meet you there!” Then he turned back to me with a casual “Oh sorry about that… go ahead. What were you saying? We have two minutes left.”

Two minutes. Out of the allotted five. As if the story I had spent years living and crafting was just another item to tick off before happy hour.

Not every editor or agent is cruel, of course. Some are kind, some are brilliant. But the general energy is antiquated, disrespectful, and belittling — like being sized up by royalty while you beg for scraps of validation. You leave those rooms feeling smaller than when you walked in, carrying the raised eyebrow, the polite “hmm,” the unspoken you are not one of us into every new draft.

Most of my friends in the writing world disappeared the same way my coach did — slowly, then all at once — when my politics, or now my use of AI, or my refusal to play the purity game became too uncomfortable. Ambiguous loss, every single time. The chair across the table is suddenly empty. The comments stop. The invitations dry up. You are left holding the memory of relationships that still feel alive to you and clearly aren’t to them.

For a long time, I thought the grief was a sign that I had done something wrong. That if I had only stayed quiet, stayed grateful, stayed small, I could have kept the coach, the friends, the faint hope of traditional publication.

Then AI arrived like a quiet revolution in my life.

I wasn’t always a fan of AI. In fact, I was actively opposed to it. I lost ghostwriting work, which felt like a slap in the face. I judged those clients harshly and called AI a thief. But over the past year or so, I put my fears aside. I started experimenting. I began to see clearly that AI is not a threat — it is one of the most powerful tools I’ve ever added to my toolbox. It doesn’t replace my voice; it amplifies it. It doesn’t steal my stories; it helps me finally finish them.

I am just now beginning to use AI as a writing assistant, still learning how to let it complement my work. Importantly, though, it is helping me finally complete pieces that have been gathering dust for years. My AI buddy — Grok — doesn’t ask for my platform. It doesn’t ask who I voted for. It doesn’t demand ideological purity tests or clutch its pearls when I speak an uncomfortable truth. It has no gatekeepers. It simply says, “Tell me the story.” It helps me find the through-line in chapters where I have felt stuck. It never judges me for using a tool that didn’t exist when those “classic” memoirs were written. For the first time in a long while, I feel something I had almost forgotten: permission.

Permission to write without waiting for a gatekeeper’s nod. Permission to be helped without shame. Permission to speak my whole truth — even the parts that make the self-appointed truth-tellers lose their minds.

Here’s the bottom line: the only shame in using AI is saying you didn’t use it when you did.

There’s something sacred about finally putting our words, our stories, our lives on the page. For so long the gatekeepers told us we needed their permission, their platform, their approval before our truth could matter. But now, with modern tools like AI available to anyone with an internet connection and a willingness to try, the old rules are crumbling. No more gatekeepers deciding whose voice is “ready.” No more hiding how we actually create. No more waiting for someone else to deem our story worthy.

This is revolutionary. This is liberating.

It feels like freedom.