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This piece is centred around the rich conversation between Ellie Zakeri and me, Madhavi (Maddy) Manchi. Our discussion on doing and writing CAE pieces surfaced many themes. Here, I’ve presented non-linear fragments of this conversation, interspersing it with citations, mostly, from the book Autoethnography (Adams, Holman Jones and Ellis 2015). I’ve chosen to describe here two salient themes from our conversation: vulnerability and the ethical dilemmas of representing other people in autoethnographic (AE) stories. The first theme speaks to the challenges of being and staying vulnerable on paper. Writing AE stories demands a capturing of emotional, fragile states on paper. This is not easy, and I found myself “ducking behind theory” to escape this often draining, process. But the answers, we reflected, lay in the practice of writing itself. The second theme was around recalling and representing experiences …