What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory – meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative & thereby rescued from oblivion – is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind & often changes with the telling.
Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, & possibly it is the work of a storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In my case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.
Quoted in epigraph to John Irving's Until I Find You
