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Last March, in a television column, I took another stab at the nature of contemporary memoirs:

I once had a drink with a book editor who was going on and on about all the fascinating memoirs he was publishing in the future. ... [A]fter this editor had finished extolling his impending products, I asked him how he knew that these memoirs were true. "Would you have asked Nabokov if his memoir was true?" he snapped. I windily replied that in the case of Nabokov, as in the case of Harold Nicholson, or Berlioz for that matter, the distinguished life certified the telling--the personality had been proven true by achievement--but in the case of My Hell in Dunster House, or whatever, the life was untried, as it were. The personality was unconfirmed by public scrutiny, so everything depended on the accuracy of the life being presented to the public for the first time.

And last August, I threw up my hands in a review I wrote for The Nation of Sean Wilsey's autobiography, Oh the Glory of It All, a memoir of growing up rich and unloved amid San Francisco's high society. I found hard to accept as truth Wilsey's verbatim reproductions--quotation marks and all--of conversations he said had taken place when he was just a few years old:

Strangely, not a single reviewer has wondered about Wilsey's superhuman powers of recall. Critics could at least have used the occasion to reflect on the question of truth in memoir. This is not, after all, Speak, Memory or The Words, memoirs in which poetic imaginations create their own truth, mere facts be damned. Oh the Glory of It All doesn't ask to be read on poetic terms, so isn't it fair to ask if the facts are accurate?

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