Observing the practices of writing in daily life, asking for the explanation of usual gestures, encouraging the narration of the ordinary of people, of intimate accounts, is not done without intrusions or alterations, whether for the narrators, their relatives, or the researcher. Telling, restoring and disseminating life stories sometimes provokes variations, metamorphoses and even authorizations for the narrators. Through a recent research involving migrant women on their relationship to writing, the article will question the transformations at work in the act of writing, both for their authors and for their relatives.