In this study I have met three authors in a dialogue seminar on their literary work. The discussion, starting from texts by Lacan and Socrates, revolved around the dichotomy of personal and private, and how to benefit from personal material in one?s literary work. The three authors reflected on the writer Karl Ove Knausgård and the photographer Sally Mann, who both are working with their own immediate family as a motif. In Knausgård, you can find a strong and self-dissecting writer persona as a medium of creating recognition in the readers mind.