The stories we tell about our lives are not necessarily those lives as they were lived, but these stories become our experience of those lives. A published narrative of an illness is not the illness itself, but it can become the experience of the illness. Life moves on, stories change with that movement, and experience changes.
Stories are true to the flux of experience, and the story affects the direction of that flux.
If calling stories true requires some category of stories called false, I confess to being unsure what a 'false' personal account would be. I have read personal accounts I considered evasive, but that evasion was their truth. The more reconstructed the story, the more powerful the truth of the desire for what is being told, as the corrected version of what was lived. Hearing the desire in the story takes me back to the need for a different level of attention to stories. She said that all Creation begins at the center from within.