Erica Wagner on why fiction tells us more about life than memoir - Times Online

Erica Wagner on why fiction tells us more about life than memoir - Times Online: "As for memoir, even Robinson Crusoe had his Friday; no man is an island, the saying goes, and writing about one's own life will always drag in the lives of other people. Not long ago, when I spoke to Doris Lessing, she told me that she would not even consider writing a third volume of memoir. To bring her own story into the present would compromise the lives of other people, people still living, people she cared for. In any case it was clear to me that she regarded her autobiographical works - however much they had been pored over by a public always eager for personal details - as having rather less value than her books of fiction.

There is an argument to be made that truth - such as it is - can only be found, not in memoir or biography, but in fiction. Fiction recreates the world not in fragments, but miraculously as a whole; you will learn more about life, your own and other people's, from Middlemarch, Madame Bovary or Moby-Dick than you are likely to from yards and yards of memoir."