Becoming a Reliable Narrator

By Patty Mulcahy

My memoir is by definition my version of events, a view of the world filtered through the writer’s perception. But what happens when those memories are distorted by a brain that wasn’t processing sensory information correctly? I was confronted with this challenge when attempting to render scenes of deep psychosis while chronicling my six-year-long descent into schizophrenia. I had to learn how to write an unreliable character in a way that was trustworthy.

When I f...