I have tried autobiography and found that I am not to be trusted with it. I hate the restrictiveness of facts; I just can't control my impulse to rearrange, suppress, add, heighten, invent, and improve. Accuracy means less to me that suggestiveness; my memory is as much an inventor as a recorder, and when it has operated it has operated almost as freely as if no personal history were involved.
Wallace Stegner, On Teaching and Writing Fiction, 2002
Wallace Stegner, On Teaching and Writing Fiction, 2002
Correct. I recently re-read my embarrassingly jejeune diaries from my youth. It was disturbing to read my accounts of events and what I thought, and yet to remember clearly that I felt very differently from my written words. To write about oneself for others to reads almost always leads to untruths.
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