If we think of the quotidianness of lived life, the trouble with it is (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity, What that usually boils down to is a belief in the superior veracity of fiction: that you can tell more of the truth about more of life by making things up. In Rortyian (Richrd Rorty) terms, it’s a commitment to the idea that the kinds of sentence used in fiction do more, better and more important work than other sorts of sentence. If you didn’t believe that you wouldn’t bother writing novels.
A memoir by a novelist is therefore, pace Nabokov, likely to be less artistic, less shapely, less considered and made, and in the larger sense less truthful than a novel. On the other hand, it does have going for it the very considerable glamour of fact, it has a cosiness of tea party with a cold intellectuality, the more menacing because it is strictly implicit rather than explicit,
A memoir by a novelist is therefore, pace Nabokov, likely to be less artistic, less shapely, less considered and made, and in the larger sense less truthful than a novel. On the other hand, it does have going for it the very considerable glamour of fact, it has a cosiness of tea party with a cold intellectuality, the more menacing because it is strictly implicit rather than explicit,
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