Here’s a tart defense of blurring the lines between fact and fiction in a memoir:
This is the second volume of my unreliable memoirs. For a palpable fantasy, the first volume was well enough received. It purported to be the true story of how the author grew from infancy through adolescence to early manhood, this sequence of amazing biological developments largely taking place in Kogarah, a suburb of Sydney, NSW, Australia. And indeed it was a true story, in the sense that I wasn’t brought up in a Tibetan monastery or a castle on the Danube. The central character was something like my real self. If the characters around him were composites, they were obviously so, and with some justification. The friend who helps you dig tunnels in your back yard is rarely the same friend who ruins your summer by flying a model aeroplane into your mother’s prize trifle, but a book with everybody in it would last as long as life, and never live at all.
I still don’t buy it, actually. It seems to me perfectly possible to write a memoir that does not use composite characters, or change people’s names, without going on for ever. In my own memoir passages in my three books, I make nothing up, create no composite characters and tell the truth as far as I can recall. Yes, it’s subjective – but it’s not a fantasy. I’m somewhat befuddled why this was beyond the talents of the extremely gifted Senator from Illinois. But then I’ve never been angling for a political career.
The Dish 