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This essay was born when my ex-wife unfriended me on Facebook. She was angry over my last novel, though to my mind, the resemblances to her and me were superficial. The story — which involves kidnapping, murder, private eyes — was clearly not “about” us. I was shocked and saddened — I’d hoped she would like the book — but this was not the first time I’d had this sort of experience.

My mom had more or less taken ownership of the “Mom” in my first novel, who shared a few of her characteristics, like red hair and a habit of sending notes — but who had some key differences too, like being dead. I’d killed off the fictional “Mom” without qualms, purely to streamline the plot, but I felt a bit awkward around my real mom’s friends.

More recently, a friend expressed concern over why my narrators are often heartbroken or depressed. He seemed worried. My ex-girlfriend even refers to my protagonists as “you” — as in “the part where you get your fingers chopped off,” even though my intact digits are in full view.

In fact, I would rather lose a real finger than be embarrassed in public. Yet my first novel is full of material related to porn, serial killing, vulgar humor. And I knew that every single person I knew, and more to the point, everyone my parents knew, would read it and think I was a monster. My high school English teacher even appeared at a reading and, during the Q. and A., requested I read a specific paragraph: a deranged killer’s gruesome confession. What could I do? I read it, in front of my parents, my girlfriend and her roommates, blushing the whole time.

But did I learn my lesson? Nope. My new book contains jokes and ideas potentially insulting to women, men, memoirists, various minorities, gay people, deaf people, old people.

Yet the thought of anyone’s being offended by something I wrote makes me want to cry. I try not to even curse around most people. An awkward dinner party moment haunts me for weeks. Still, in the book’s title story, I even have a first-person narrator become convinced he is impotent and turn into a perverted Internet troll! Now I have to go to parties and shake hands with nice people. Yet once that story popped into my head — I had to write it. So why do I do these things? Am I a monster?

Sort of.

Michel Leiris, in his essay “The Autobiographer as Torero,” says that the only writing project worth attempting would be one that risked ruining his personal life. Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose multivolume self-portrait triggered several legal threats, talks about the need to court risk, and even shame, then moved his family to the country to protect them from the press.

Closer to home, a brilliant novelist friend calls me in a panic when she finds people have been talking about her online. This tends to happen just after she has published something. It is impossible that the causal link would escape her. But the link between two parts of her brain? That is something else. Perhaps being a writer is a bit like having Tourette’s, a neurological disorder. Or what psychologists call “intrusive thoughts”: unwanted and disturbing ideas and images that suddenly attack us unbidden. A need to speak the unspeakable thing. The very thing you most do not want to say, even to yourself. When someone tells me a bit of my writing was upsetting or depressing or tough to read, I want to say, No kidding. Try writing it.

To be clear, my work is not in the “based on real life” camp; I write about vampires, ghosts, gangsters and sexy cloned spies. My “real life” mostly consists of sitting in my pajamas daydreaming about gangsters and sexy spies while staring out the window at a cat. (Though I do put the real cats in my stories.) But knowing that what I write will be read by people I know, knowing that I may offend people, that it might be upsetting or disturbing, that it might make me look “bad”: This is always with me. Even at this moment, writing these words now.

If I expand the idea slightly, there are even more ways in which writing is a risky, potentially humiliating experience. I wrote an essay about Holocaust literature, arguing that only those who experienced or witnessed atrocities have the right to speak of them. Then I promptly decided to make a character in a story a survivor who told his tales from the camp, immediately doing what I’d just declared to be in poor taste. I hate dream-sequences but keep using them, just as I end up perversely violating every general rule I learned about writing.

Let’s face it: just writing something, anything, and showing it to the world, is to risk ridicule and shame. What if it is bad? What if no one wants to read it, publish it? What if I can’t even finish the thing? Every time I begin a book, a story, even a fresh page, I have a sense that it might go horribly wrong. And for a professional writer, working on multiyear projects, that would be more than an emotional humiliation. It would involve awkward letters from the student loan people and the credit card company.

I could never live like that, you might be thinking. But of course you could, and do. You think you know what is going to happen today, after you read this article, finish your bagel and coffee and head out the door, but you don’t. There might be a flood, a fire, a terrorist attack. Or you might fall in love in the elevator. Or meet a long-lost friend on the train. Or break a tooth on something in your dreary sandwich at lunch and find a diamond.

Life, in other words, is unpredictable, sometimes even risky. And inner life — the realm of emotions, memories, dreams and unconscious urges — is not much better. But if we were totally aware of this, then going to the grocery store would be impossible, so we keep that stuff out of mind while we go about our days. Writing involves thinking all the unthinkable stuff while still taking care of business.

Writing then, must feel risky in order to feel like life. I used to cringe when people talked about “brave” writing. I’d think, calm down, it’s not like you’re a fireman or a Special Forces commando. If the mission fails, just toss it in the wastebasket. But I do think, upon reflection, that there is a need to generate emotional risk, a sense of imminence, of danger, in order to transmit that aliveness to the page. This needn’t mean personal revelation or offensive language. Sometimes quiet, dense writing is the most deeply and complexly honest. Sometimes intellectual discourse is brave in our Twitter culture. Genuine and sincere emotion can be risky in a world of snark and irony. So can making silly jokes about matters our society regards with sanctimonious seriousness. Sometimes it is just a matter of a writer doing what she does not yet know how to do, speaking about something he does not yet understand. The risk of ambitious failure.

That’s why I decided to write this essay. Because, of all the topics that crossed my mind, it was the one that made me squirm. Because, when I told that same writer-friend, the one who hates being talked about, that my ex-wife had unfriended me, and I said, “I suppose it’s like getting a one-star review,” she wisely replied: “Or a five.”

David Gordon is the author of the novel “Mystery Girl,” as well as the forthcoming story collection “White Tiger on Snow Mountain.”