I want to post a caveat to these writings, in case anyone I've so carefully tried to mask should piece together more than I hope they would. The caveat is: sometimes I lie. For the lack of a more nuanced word.

Because it is not that we remember first, and then write it down. Rather, we write to remember. Sometimes we remember wrongly, in the bluntest sense of the word. The paintings of Monet are not the most realistic of paintings, but they capture an essence of the scene truer than a photograph could. I think that is the goal for me, and for all writers of memoirs. I realize that this rings dangerously close to a certain disgraced author, who said: memory is subjective. People flatfootedly rejected his work after that. I want to make a case for not being so quick to judge. Is the pursuit of accuracy in the details more important than the pursuit of light? Monet didn't think so. Neither did the writer of A Million Little Pieces. Neither do I. And neither should anyone else who felt touched by a work of art. Because the "truth" is not one-dimensional, to make it so would be to shut out a smidgen of inaccuracy, but also, the light.

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