Most of the time, it would seem.
Shortly after I graduated from college, I read Looking Back by Joyce Maynard. Maynard is exactly my age and graduated from high school in 1971 as I did. I thoroughly enjoyed the book as her reflections on life and society very much resonated with mine. Maynard, you will recall, lived with J.D. Salinger for a while when she was nineteen. She chronicles this relationship, as well as her high school years in At Home in the World, published in 1998. She describes how what she wrote in Looking Back and her other writing of the time reflected what she thought her her publishers and readers wanted, and not what she really felt and believed at all.
Several years ago I read John Steinbeck's book The Log from the Sea of Cortez, in which he chronicles an expedition through the Gulf of California he took with his friend of Cannery Row fame, Ed Ricketts. I seem to recall Steinbeck recounting his wife waving goodbye on the dock as they left Monterey. In any case she is not on the trip as recounted in the book. In 2002 Andromeda Romano-Lax published Searching for Steinbeck's Sea of Cortez. She recounts the trip she and her family took re-tracing Steinbeck's voyage and provides some background to the original trip. She mentions that Steinbeck's marriage was heading into difficult times around the time of the adventure, and that not only was his wife on the Western Flyer with Steinbeck, Ricketts, and the crew, but she did almost all of the meal preparation. But Steinbeck chose to write her out of the book.
Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, wrote in The Long Loneliness of a solo pilgrimage she took to various places in Europe that held meaning for her. The only problem was this was actually a honeymoon trip, according to Paul Elie, in The Life You Save May Be Your Own. But then Elie's book documents many discrepencies between Day's life and writing, as well as that of Thomas Merton. (Flannery O'Conner and Walker Percy, the other two subjects of the book, don't escape criticism, but since they wrote mostly fiction the discrepencies are not there to highlight.)
Wendy Merrill, author of Falling Into Manholes, which is classified as biography, told Sedge Thomson in a interview on West Coast Live that to avoid portential legal problems she not only changed names, but circumstances and events as well, and sometimes combined multiple individuals into one.
Sometimes a novel is said to be a "thinly disguised" autobiography, but I'm realizing that we may want to recognize that the "non" in "non-fiction" may not be as accurate or true as we generally want to believe. Maybe we need to appreciate some of our books at face value, and not expect all of our autobiographies and memoirs to be "true" in the strictest sense of the word.
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