It took me seven years of writing before I published my first story. And then, the publications trickled in over the next five years.

Some of the biggest challenges were, page after page, standing naked in front of the reader.

I think the act of lying can be separated from the genre of memoir. Though often times, people are unaware of their own subjectivity.

I think every narrator is an unreliable narrator. In its classic definition - an unreliable narrator is one who reveals something they don't know themselves to be revealing. We all do that.

There's something known as "memory conformity," also known as "social contagion of memory," which refers to a situation where one person's telling of a memory influences another person's account of that same experience.

I don't teach narrative theory by itself anymore, but I kind of use it when critiquing student manuscripts. So, it works its way in there, whether I like it or not.

You can't hide behind the guise of fiction. No matter how autobiographical a fictional scene is, you can always tell the reader - in protecting yourself - that you made it up.