the sheer persuasiveness of first-person experience is not a good indicator of its fidelity to the truth. It’s as if we forget, when we are under the spell of that experience, about the other possible meaning of “first person.” Taken in a different context—in literature—it means almost the opposite of unassailable authority. It means limited omniscience. It means unreliability. It means subjectivity. It means, quite simply, one person’s story.
