“We live in an age that prizes authenticity and personalized narratives, as embodied in the form of the memoir. Eyewitness accounts have an immediacy and reality that compels belief, and we think they can convey a truth greater than any fiction. Yet, perhaps paradoxically, we are also eager to seize upon any factual deviation and inconsistency in such narratives and declare the entirety to be mere fiction. There’s an all-or-nothing bleakness to this dynamic. But we should have conceded from the start that narratives are irreducibly subjective, though that does not mean that they do not also convey the truth.”