I’ve written memoirs, personal essays, and fiction, and in none of those genres is verifiable accuracy my primary goal, as it is in journalism. In essays and especially memoirs, however, I try to be conscious of and guide the reader among the levels of accuracy (ranging from verifiable fact to conjecture) that can arise from research and remembering. In fiction, I feel blissfully freed from that responsibility and equally horrified by the chaos and infinite possibilities of imagination. So my fiction tends to draw heavily from my experience for some sort of mooring or structure upon which imagination can act. For example, in the excerpt above from The Tumble Inn, the action, a rather rustic husband-wife sexual encounter, is part factual—I will not tell you which part!—and part imagined, as it involves considerably more peril than I actually experienced.
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