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When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad ones you did do well, that's Memoirs.

When you have a novel set in a fictional history, you still should get your history right.

Memoirs are - memory is - rarely 100 percent accurate. Any autobiography is a construct, ballpark, even unnatural. Private diaries, too, can be unreliable - a detail that matters only if the diary is read.

I've written three books you could think of as memoirs.

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.

As an author of narrative history, I read a lot of history books.

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.

People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.

I'm not about to write my memoirs. Not for a long time.

We've all faced the charge that our novels are history lite, and to some extent, that's true. Yet for some, historical fiction is a way into reading history proper.