My Kind of Memoir

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I'm ambivalent about the current furor over memoirs that bend the truth or even fabricate it altogether. Don't get me wrong. I certainly do believe that if you're going to write an autobiographical memoir about your experiences in a concentration camp during World War II, it's necessary that you, in fact, did have some experiences in a concentration camp.

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I get anxious, though, when I read about the lengths to which various reporters are going these days to expose the untruths in every memoir that hits print. Whether it's websites that scan a 400-page manuscript looking for passages from other books, or determined fact checkers out to disprove …