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Save some long-mothballed, early twentieth-century avant-garde movements, memoir may be the only literary genre requiring a statement of principles. This applies to readers and writers alike. Do you expect a memoirist to show perfect recall, to reconstruct a past with vividly described environments, clear dialogue, and novelistic scenes? Or do you want a memoirist to admit the fallibility of her memory? Perhaps in an introductory preface, and to confess that some scenes, characters, and timelines may be elided, compressed, combined — i.e., do you mind if she makes things up, as long as it’s in the service of a good story? (Or are you looking for something else entirely?)

In Los Angeles recently, during the Q&A portion of an event at the Hammer Museum, author Deb Olin Unferth, who appeared with novelist David Bezmozgis, sided with those who would claim that memory is acutely fallible and that a memoir should be written accordingly. Unferth’s memoir, Revolution: The Year I Fell In Love And Went to Join the War (Henry Holt), is made up of short, pithy chapters and frequently acknowledges the author’s uncertainty about the events she recounts in her book: when Unferth, a freshman in college, dropped out of school in 1987 to tag along with her older boyfriend, whose passion for liberation theology and socialism led him to seek out ideological kinsmen among the revolutionaries of Central America.

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