“In truth, memory’s great betrayal, that it will not lie intact in wait for us, is lament enough to revisit in every generation. This is what I go to nonfiction for, the way we pick at the scab, poke our finger in the wound of memory’s fickle and existential transience, and the inconvenience of our desire to make things whole and right.”
At Brevity, Liz Stephens reflects on fact and nonfiction, articulating her loss of trust in John D’Agata’s narrative nonfiction, which she examines by way of a contrast to David Shields’ Reality Hunger, and none other than Cheryl Strayed’s “The Love of My Life.”
