Writers of D/deaf autobiographies or biographies face something of a dilemma when incorporating deafness into the stories they tell. This includes writers of D/deaf fiction because many such works are based on the same personal experiences from which autobiographies and biographies are derived. At heart, autobiographies and biographies are merely stories, and stories cannot exist without some type of conflict. Because D/deaf autobiographies and biographies are in some sense about deafness and because no autobiography or biography can ever be complete unless it captures the discord inherent in the subject's life, several questions arise: What is the fundamental relationship between deafness and conflict? As the task of relating and reliving the tensions of a D/deaf life is approached through the craft of storytelling, does deafness "become" the central conflict, or does deafness instead become merely one "component" of it? Or does it perhaps become some mixture of the two? Drawing from one of the author's own autobiographical fiction projects that involves the life story of Daniel Tallerman, a hard-of-hearing teenager struggling to survive the abuses of a violent alcoholic father, as well as those of both the hearing and the Deaf communities, the author discusses deafness as conflict and conflict component. Both are equally complex. If both are fully developed, chances are the result will be a more honest story, exactly the type of story that "must" be written because ultimately it is only honesty that has any hope of ensuring that stories do not repeat themselves. (Contains 1 note.)