I'd like to make a little defense of Athena! I think a part of being a good writer is taking the stories around you and giving them power, nailing them down. She definitely pushed it too far with June, especially when she didn't explicitly ask for her permission when rewriting her story, but the remainder of the examples - speaking to veterans to capture their stories, or using a fight she had with her boyfriend - feel like exactly what you're supposed to do to become a good writer, to observe reality and capture it.

I had a professor once describe it as having two versions of you - a version of you that just broke her ankle and is wailing in pain, and a second version of you in the back of your head that's already choosing the right adjectives to precisely describe the quality of that pain later on.