ethics questions raised by Gayle Forman's If I Stay

I recently read If I Stay, Gayle Forman's YA novel about a teenage girl waiver between life and death after a car accident and whether her survival is a matter of choice. Ok enough book. A quick read, vivid characters, moments of surprising authenticity (like when the main character and her boyfriend "play" each other).

After finishing the book, I read the Q&A with the author and skidded to a halt. The book was inspired by the tragic deaths of a family with whom Forman was friends and their surviving daughter. (Sorry for the spoiler, but it isn't much of one. The way the book was set up, if Mia had died, the author would have been stuck basically advocating for suicide.) I was shocked that the book was premised on such a tragic situation that Forman's friends had experienced. When I mentioned this to a friend she asked me why it upset me; writers draw from real life all of the time.

My horror had felt so obvious that it took me some time to put my answer together. I know that writers often draw from their own experience, that they often draw from tragedies that happen to others, and that they often draw from people in their lives. But it was this particular combination that struck me as in poor taste: the tragedy happened to people she knew and loved. She did not have the distance of someone inspired by a headline nor the ownership of the event that would come if it had happened to her. She did not claim to write for closure or to have asked the surviving member of this family if the novel would be ok. I was left feeling like she had somehow used her relationship with the family that passed away and cheapened the experiences of the surviving girl.

What do you think? Am I being too hard on Ms. Forman? Is everything fair game? Where do you draw inspiration and where do you draw the line?