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I’ve been a professional writer for fifty years, and, with the exception of four instructional books for writers, virtually everything I’ve written has been fiction. (I did turn out several pseudonymous works of purported nonfiction, ostensibly psychological case studies, but they were entirely fabricated, fiction in sheep’s clothing.)

So this is a departure for me. In the pages that follow, everything I’ve written is as it happened. I realize that this no longer seems to be a requirement in memoirs, that some memoirists apparently feel free to let their imaginations improve on reality, but when I want to use my imagination I sit down and write a novel. A memoir, it seems to me, should confine itself to what the author remembers.

Clearly, this doesn’t matter to everyone. When I expressed contempt for one such imaginative memoirist, a contempt shared by Oprah Winfrey, my daughter Amy couldn’t understand why I was getting so exercised. “Maybe he made some of it up,” she said, “but I have to say I found it very entertaining.”

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