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.

I like a text that reminds the reader its a text sometimes.

My teaching career started with me teaching comp at a very small school in Buffalo. And I was terrible at that point. They never should have hired me.

The biggest thing was that second person allowed me to trick myself into revealing more about myself. It gave me an authorial distance to get closer to the action and emotions, if that makes sense.

The least trusted testimony in a court of law is eyewitness testimony. We are simply not good reporters of facts that happen to us, or in front of us. But that's not the same as knowingly lying.

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.

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.