But facts would seem to prove him wrong. Dark Back of Time reads like a memoir. He is surprised to find truth surfacing in what he knows to have been his inventions. He considers the reasons why people see themselves in the book. And it leads to him to other odd and unusual lives, books, and authors.
Truth is as unlikely as fiction.
Possibly it is all truth. Or possibly it is all fiction. The book has a documentary character. It makes for an odd novel, the author easily tempted by the tangential, following and losing various leads and narrative threads. There is some fear and uncertainty about setting all this down in words, about the act of writing itself.