Comment by eloisius
2 years ago
It’s hard even when you don’t take into consideration that you don’t know what you’ve misremembered. Try writing a memoir. You’ll realize you never actually remember what anyone says, but caveating your dialog with “and then I think they said something like” would make horrible reading.
Don’t people just bulk qualify the dialogue, e.g. “I don’t remember the exact words. Tom said … then Dick replied … something like that”.
Often we don’t quote people and instead provide a high level description of what they said, e.g. “Harry described the problems with his car.”, where detail is omitted.
Sure. Some memoirs state this in the foreword. There are also memoirs that are "fictionalized", like James Frey's book "A Million Little Pieces." Originally published as a memoir in 2003, it was later revealed that many of the events Frey described were exaggerated or fabricated. This caused a lot of controversy at the time, but many subsequent memoirs followed this pattern and I think it's become quite accepted in the genre.