Though The Liars’ Club rang true to me when I wrote it, from this juncture it seems to have sprung from a state of loving delusion about my family. In those days, I still enjoyed a child’s desperate tendency to put sparkles on my whole tribe. Were I writing that story today, I’d be less generous to them while perhaps shining more empathy on my younger self. Whether age has granted me more wholesome care for the girl I was, or whether life’s ravages have ground down my heart so I’m more self-centered, I can’t say. Am I healthily less codependent or a bigger bitch? You could argue either way. Although I’d fix a wrong date or point of fact for the book to correct it as written record, I couldn’t alter any major take on the past without redoing the whole tome. The self who penned that book formed the filter for those events, I didn’t fabricate stuff, but today, other scenes I’d add might tell a less forgiving story.
– from “The Art of Memoir” by Mary Karr
