Dear Truth Police,

I understand that I’ve been reported for multiple infractions and am required to respond.

Complaint 37B: Fudging. I don’t deny that in my essay about slow running, I wrote about a neighbor stopping her car to make a comment when in fact she did so riding her horse. I live in an area where I run past cows, free range chickens, a donkey, two goats, three horses and occasionally a fox. I confess too that the piece actually sparked when I ran on vacation uphill from a well-populated resort beach. At home I hardly ever encounter anyone else when I run. Big deal! Why distract readers with complications?

Complaint C149C: Fabrication. Till I’d known her for years, my cosmopolitan friend Jill didn’t mention her upbringing was Mormon. In my portrait of our friendship, I described learning this surprising fact when Jill told me the church for her mother’s funeral. That four-sentence scene is made up. I did attend that funeral, and Jill had indeed held back her birth religion as a secret. I just don’t recall when or where she revealed it. Again, you’ve nabbed me, but I can’t see the harm of fictionalizing one minuscule anecdote.

Complaint 278: Distortion. A confidante when I worked in China says I left out significant ups and downs, along with my worries and doubts from my personal essay “Falling in Love in China.” But Truth Police, Ms. allotted me just 900 words! My romance with the man who became my husband really did transform my ideas about sex and love. Put out your infamous tentacles and you can confirm that I went from a fairly promiscuous “before” to a thoroughly faithful “after.” So I protest this charge. A narrative arc isn’t dishonest when limited space dictates smoothing out its bumps.

Complaint Q534: Omission. True: In my not-quite-finished memoir, I fail to mention two early boyfriends. One, Micky Hoffman, took me to the senior prom – sort of. He was playing violin in Beethoven’s Ninth that night, and I first sat through that, overwhelmed. Then on to the dance, and afterward we kissed on my doorstep. But our chemistry? Zero. The other, Carl Rawl, was a smart and sensitive camp counselor who I later dumped for reasons that embarrassed me even at the time. Don’t ding me for deep-sixing these guys! Neither played a starring role in my emotional development.

Complaint 879Z: Falsehood. This, the most serious accusation in your report, I deny up, down and sideways. Supposedly when I’ve related that my first ever article pitch got me an assignment with the New York Times, I was uttering a bald-faced lie. Your unnamed source argues that I must have been pitching for years beforehand. I wonder if this came from the magazine editor who yelled at me in a panel discussion for encouraging aspiring writers to aim high from the start. Although I carefully explained four situations where this strategy can succeed, including my case, she shook her head vociferously. “Doesn’t happen. Doesn’t happen. You have to start small and work your way up,” she insisted.

Truth Police, I deserve to keep my publishing license. Don’t listen to someone who argues that something surprising could not have happened. Or that my examples of fudging, fabrication, distortion and omission amount to dishonesty. Or that minor discrepancies poison our cultural discourse and therefore matter as much as major misdeeds. You need to go after the memoirists who write things that never happened to them at all except in their imagination! They’re the genuine culprits.

Thank you for considering my appeal.

Respectfully,
Marcia Yudkin