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fact that he didn’t hurt himself badly or violently enough to justify himself as self-perpetrator.

    Kaavya Viswanathan’s
How Opal Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life:
a piece of popular fiction, written quickly for undemanding young readers, displays some “similarities” to an earlier work of popular fiction for undemanding young readers. Excuse me, but isn’t the entire publishing industry built on telling the exact same stories over and over again? Since when is that news? This is teen literature; it’s genre fiction. These are novels based on novels based on novels, in which every convention of character and plot has been trotted out a thousand times before. When I worked at a newspaper, we were routinely dispatched to “match” a story from the
Times:
to do a new version of someone else’s idea. But had we “matched” any of the
Times
’s words—even the most banal of phrases—it could have been a firing offense. The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of minor differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence. Trial by Google.

    I don’t feel any of the guilt normally attached to “plagiarism,” which seems to me organically connected to creativity itself.

    (Ambitious) memoir isn’t fundamentally a chronicle of experience; rather, memoir is the story of consciousness contending with experience.

    What I believe about memoir is that you just happen to be using the nuts and bolts of your own life to illustrate your vision. It isn’t really me; it’s a character based on myself that I made up in order to illustrate things I want to say. In other words, I think memoir is as far from real life as fiction is. I think you’re obligated to use accurate details, but selection is as important a process as imagination.

    Proust said that he had no imagination; what he wanted was reality, infused with something else.
In Search of Lost Time
begins and ends with the actual thoughts of the author; it’s the manifestation of what the author must think, based on what he does in fact think. The book, by being about Marcel, a writer, is as much about the writing as it is about anything that “happens.” I don’t mean that everything we think is what we truly feel or that only in thought are we free of the lies and illusions of the world. I mean that you have a right, as a thinking person, to think what you think and that the closer you stick to the character of thought in your writing, the more license you have to claim that you’re not making things up. Frey, for example, wrote but didn’t think,
I was in prison for three months
. Instead, he probably thought something more like
I was in prison for three months, man; I was in fucking prison for three months; give it to them; throw it down
[their throats];
they’ll take it; they don’t know what I went through; I’m tough
[goes to the mirror to make sure],” etc. That is, he made up the prison part: he fictionalized it (without first admitting to having done so).

    Memoir is a genre in need of an informed readership. It’s a misunderstanding to read a memoir as though the writer owes thereader the same record of literal accuracy that is owed in newspaper reporting. Memoirs belong to the category of literature, not journalism. What the memoirist owes the reader is the ability to persuade him or her that the narrator is trying, as honestly as possible, to get to the bottom of the experience at hand. A memoir is a tale taken from life—that is, from actual, not imagined, occurrences—related by a first-person narrator who is undeniably the writer. Beyond these bare requirements, an autobiographical work has the same responsibility that a short story or novel has: to shape a piece of experience so that it moves from a tale of private interest to one with meaning for the disinterested reader.

    What I want to do is take the banality of nonfiction (the