"I have been corrected on some points, mostly of chronology. Also my mother thinks that a dog I describe as ugly was actually quite handsome. I've allowed some of these points to stand, because this is a book of memory, and memory has its own story to tell. But I have done my best to make it tell a truthful story."
        Tobias Wolff, from This Boy's Life

"I know that the self can be too easy a subject, that candor without the restraint of reticence is so much cheap talk. I know that it's as ugly a lie to be disarmingly hard on oneself as to be charmingly easy."
       Geoffrey Wolff

"All my life I had been trying to make sense of my experiences without understanding a crucial piece of my history. I couldn't have said, two years ago, what it was in how I had lived before meeting Jerry Salinger that made his power over me so vast and enduring. I couldn't have said how the events of that year I spent with Jerry shaped what I went on to do with my life. Now it was hitting me in the image of my daughter. All these years, I had been holding on to secrets that kept me from understanding or explaining myself. I knew it was time at last to explore my story.
        Joyce Maynard from At Home in the World