A story that should never have been told

I told the famous writer one particular short story he’d written was a great favorite of mine and that I go back and reread it often. He made a pained face and said, “I don’t like that story. I wrote it about someone who ended up being the biggest mistake of my life. I knew a woman who wrote a novel about her childhood. The book came out, no one bought or read it, and it disappeared very quickly. She told me the thing she was saddest about was she’d wasted the subject of her childhood on the book. I feel the same way about that short story: I wasted so much love on it when the one it was about turned out to be a very bad person.”