#9 Is Your Memoir a Lie?

Well, probably, in a way. When we decide what to put in our memoir and what to leave out we are already filtering the story to suit our intended narrative arc. But that is the work of writing your story without making it a journal of everything that has happened. I would argue it’s the essential work of the writer of a memoir.

Memory is subjective. If someone else in the same room at the same time wrote the same scene, it would be very different.

What do we do as writers when we realize we don’t remember things exactly? How do we include dialogue for our characters? What about protecting the identity of certain people in our story? How do we recreate the time and place if details are blurry in our memory?