Up: [[Personal Essay and Memoir]] Created: 2023-10-02 Updated: 2024-09-09 > [!orbit] Ann Patchett in *The Dutch House* > But we overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we’re not seeing it as the people we were, we’re seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered. It’s a profound truth that I’ve always known but never delved into. I’ve known it because I read lots of books about writing memoir and lots of memoirs too. And in all of the books, authors write about ‘their’ truth or an ‘essential’ truth or the ‘core’ of an event. I don’t read memoirs for their newspaper-like factual accounting of events. That's literal truth. I read them to hear the emotional truth from the author’s perspective. So, while I can certainly appreciate the concerns of people who are written about negatively in someone’s memoir, as a reader I’m not the least bit bothered by memory being fickle or the author’s present self intruding on the past. I think of memoirs like [[Dreams]]. Whatever the writer or dreamer utters is significant for them or they wouldn’t have remembered or thought to utter it. That’s good enough for me.