Bloomsbury’s former editor-in-chief Alexandra Pringle popped up on the Today programme this week to argue that Jason Arday’s publisher could not have been expected to fact-check his book Great and Unfortunate Things. The argument she made raised a lot of eyebrows and has precipitated a lot of self-righteous ridicule online.  

The problem with Arday’s book, whether you call it a memoir or an autobiography, is that a great deal of what he says in it about those verifiable features of the historical record seems to have been codswallop

The problem with Arday’s book, whether you call it a memoir or an autobiography, is that a great deal of what he says in it about those verifiable features of the historical record seems to have been codswallop

‘I think questions of truth and accuracy in memoir are very, very blurred because they are subjective accounts of a bit of someone’s life,’ she told listeners. ‘A memoir is not an autobiography, and it’s important to make the distinction between the two. If you’re thinking of, for example, John Major or Mrs Thatcher’s autobiography you would expect that to be absolutely true. But a memoir is a work of literature which is verging on fiction, and you cannot necessarily expect a memoir to be a factual day-by-day or year-by-year account of someone’s life.’ 

By way of a disclaimer, I should say I know Alexandra Pringle a little and like her very much. But I find myself in disagreement with her here. The primary distinction between memoir and autobiography seems to me one of scope, not factuality. If you pick up an autobiography, you expect to read the story of someone’s whole life. A memoir will be the account of a slice, or a few slices, from a life; or the author’s perspective on a slice of someone else’s life. You can write lots of volumes of memoir, but unless you’re Barry Humphries or........

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