And then Perl and Schwartz carved out a middle ground that I find troubling. “If we stick only to hard, verifiable facts,” they write, “our past is as skeletal as line drawings in a coloring book. We must color them in.” And “coloring them in” includes letting “imagination fill in details we only vaguely remember.” Given the vagaries of human memory, that concession is, to me, a license to write fiction and label it fact. I suspect Perl and Schwartz would disagree, arguing, perhaps, that “coloring in” is a way to get at “emotional truth.”
