WHEN the great American writer Joseph Mitchell was having his reputation tarnished by a biographer who claimed he invented characters and embroidered events, his New Yorker comrade Janet Malcolm leapt to his posthumous defence.

The reason most writers of reportage stuck to the facts, she said, was not because they were more virtuous than Mitchell, it was because they lacked his imagination.

“Mitchell’s travels across the line that separates fiction and non-fiction are his singular feat,” she wrote in a review. “His impatience with the annoying, boring bits of actuality, his slashings through the underbrush of unreadable facticity, give his pieces their electric force, are why they’re so much more exciting to read than the work of other non-fiction writers with ambition.”

Much as I admire Malcolm, she was a bit of a minx: a contrarian that liked to bait her readers with provocative opinions. And much as I admire Mitchell, I think he crossed lines a journalist — even a “creative” journalist — ought not to cross. But memoir is different. Memoir is the pursuit of a partial truth that lies beyond the strict laying out of facts. When charting a relationship, we can say: “This happened, then this, and then this,” but the significance we attach to the chronology is entirely subjective.

A memoirist may base their book on events as they remember them, but which ones they choose to emphasise and which they choose to downplay will alter the way the reader views the whole. In fiction the “unreliable narrator” is a literary device; in memoir it’s a given. We are all unreliable narrators of our own lives. No-one should ever pick up a memoir expecting a definitive account. At best, you are being served up one party’s “truth”; other brands will be available (though they may never be written).

This is a preamble to talking about The Salt Path: a scandal which, according to some........

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