To think of a life-story as a compendium of memories which one is free to interpret in the present according to the demands (and desires) of the present seems to me characteristic of a writer’s way of thinking. I would contrast this with the way many people see their life-story: as a history that is forever fixed (‘you can’t change the past’). The strange thing is how many of us want to fix our life-story, by repeating over and over, to ourselves and to others, one or other preferred interpretation of it.

J. M. Coetzee, The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy (2015)