The nature of memory—unreliable and changeable—means the stories of our life are just that, stories not facts. Just think of tangling with the shared, contradictory, memories of a sibling.

An exercise in eighth grade history revealed to me that there is no one story for any given event. The school I went to began with a morning assembly and, for me, was followed by history class. One morning my history teacher asked the class to write down what had happened in the assembly we had just attended. I was stunned by how different the versions were of this very recent “history.”

When we write memoir, we are telling our story, our version of events. And true or not, it is our version that we carry and that affects how we see things.

In the 1970’s when I was a somewhere between six and ten years old, my uncle Jules and his Australian girlfriend Caroline came to stay with my family in Connecticut. Jules and Caroline had been living a bohemian life in London. Before they arrived–as I later learned–my parents discussed where Caroline would sleep. There were twin beds in the guestroom, but my parents were concerned that the unwed couple sharing a bedroom would send the wrong message to my two older siblings and me. The debate was resolved by Caroline who decided for 1970’s propriety not to sleep with her boyfriend in a house with children. So my parents gave her my room, and I moved in with my sister. This inconvenience to me should have secured an accurate memory of these events. But not so. Instead I carried the certainty that Jules and Caroline had, in fact, stayed together in our guestroom.

Accuracy be damned. It is my version of events that I still hold onto.

And it is my version that  informed my belief years later that it was okay for me to live with my French-Romanian boyfriend in Paris during the summer between my junior and senior years of college, despite what I knew would be my parents’ disapproval.

But this too may be another fabrication: I cannot tell you when I learned about the behind the scenes decision-making regarding Jules and Caroline’s sleeping arrangements. Perhaps I only linked  these stories later to heighten the pleasure I felt in believing myself cosmopolitan– Jules and Caroline living in London, Stephen and I living in Paris.

We are constantly editing and revising our lives. Remembering, forgetting. Selecting and excising the details. Favoring one version over another. The stories we tell reveal not just what has happened to us, but who we are and how we live and what we believe. They create the  world we inhabit.