A book of untruths

A memoir by Miranda Doyle

Sometimes, I really would like to step into another’s shoes and discover other people’s life. It’s always an interesting read, because everyone have different lives, perspective on things. So I was curious about this book and bought it and started reading on the author’s life, a memoir. The book introduces us to lies, through her perspective she talks about it and how it relates to her life. The truth of lies, the expectations of lies, and lies in general.

“Perhaps then the answer is to drop the ‘memoir’ label and throw myself in with ‘creative non-fiction’.

Here truth is no longer the measure. Anything underwhelming can be overcome by imagination. Or is creative non-fiction really just an excuse to lie?

And I don’t want to lie.

A book of untruths.

A book about lies/untruths but in the book the author mentioned about how she didn’t want to lie (mentioned in part/above in the book) yet it’s not about lying, it’s leaned more towards the memories as she mentioned.

How we are unable to remember somethings and our brains made something up to fill in the gaps in our memories (false memories) – in a sense it was something like a lie too. One event, can only have one truth, yet there’s are many versions of it but we can’t say that everyone is lying since everyone might remembered the same events differently. It was truth for them until someone talked about it and different versions came around, were argued and rejected since no one could prove their versions were correct. Everyone keep to their own versions.

One part of the book – mentioned how she was arguing with her father, how they remembered it as her being at everyone’s throat.

While the author saying how she remembered it as her family was the ones who was being at hers.

The disparity of memories.

There were more exploration in the early chapters of the book and slowly you get into the flow of her life in the latter.

In summary, I would recommend it to those who likes biography and those who would discover slowly the layers of a person’s life.

Nothing fancy (like world war, famine) just a person’s life and their struggles.

But it got me thinking a lot.