What a great deal of fuss we make about the distinction between memoir and fiction, between story-telling and truth. Publishers, understandably, need to put things into categories so that they can market them. Bookstores need categories so that they can correctly place their books on shelves. But these necessities have absolutely nothing to do with writing, or even with forms.
Every memoir is a form of recreation, just as memory itself is.
By the time something comes into language it has passed through an immense process of ordering, reordering, systematizing, arranging, adapting itself to the particular grammar and syntactic requirements of the language in which it will come to expression. To imagine that we arrive at truth in this process, at anything that accurately records actual experience, is as silly, I think, as imagining that a photograph, more than a painting, depicts the real world. Everything passes through the subjective on its way to becoming what it is. You try to describe a scene, something real, that really happened, when you were a child, or even twenty years ago. Buddenbrooks , one of the most respected novels of the twentieth Century, a family, generational novel in the realistic tradition, is in fact a detailed, often precise study of Thomas Mann's own family.