★★★☆☆ | Literary Fiction | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | GoodreadsÂ
Highlights
Where a hardier boy would have run away from home or got in trouble with the police, I sat with my nose in a book so I wouldn’t have to think about things I didn’t like and couldn’t prevent happening.
What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory—meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion—is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.