My Nine Lives: Chapters of a Possible Past, by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

This is not a memoir. Memoirs are nonfiction, and Jhabvala makes it clear that these stories are fictional. Each features a different cast of characters, different conflicts, different settings. As she says in her “Apologia”, “The central character—the ‘I’ of each chapter—is myself, but the parents I have claimed are not, or hardly ever quite my own.” However, she does say that these stories are tales of a life she might have lived. “Every situation was one I could have been in myself, and so...