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I don't like memoirs. I think they're self-serving, and people use them to settle scores, and I really tried not to do that. You have to have a really interesting life to justify memoir, and my life has been pretty ho-hum.

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.

A memoir takes some particular threads, some incidents, some experience from a person's life and gives an account of it.

Some people think memoirs should be held to a perfect journalistic standard. Some people don't. Obviously I don't. My goal was never to create or to write a perfect journalistic standard of my life. It was always to be as literature.

The difference between memoir and autobiography, as far as I see it, is that a memoir is there primarily to tell one particular story, whereas an autobiography tries to be a full account of a life.

I have never liked the memoir form because I tend to think that memory fictionalizes anyway. Once you claim that you are writing a narrative purely from memory, you are already in the realm of fiction.

A good autobiography is like a document: a mirror of the age on which people can 'depend.' In a novel, by contrast, it's not the facts that matter, but precisely what you add to the facts.

I don't view my memory as accurate or static - and, in autobiographical fiction, my focus is still on creating an effect, not on documenting reality - so 'autobiographical,' to me, is closer in meaning to 'fiction' than 'autobiography.'

I don't like the word 'autobiography.' I rather like the term 'autofiction.' The second you make a script out of the story of your life, it becomes fictional. Of course, the truth is never far. But the story is created out of it.