Hampl’s Rationale

In Hampl’s chapter “Memories and Imagination”, she develops the beginning of a story only for readers to later realize that many of the details which she was writing were not entirely true. Her reasoning isn’t only for her own entertainment or simply because she is a compulsive liar. There is a certain rationale for why she made up certain details. It’s all a first draft. Although this piece of writing was supposed to be a memoir, it is still important for the details of her story to serve a purpose, to be impactful. In this first draft the qualities of the characters and objects which she introduced need to have value for the future purposes they will serve later on in the story. For example, regarding the “lie” she told about the music book earlier on, she reasons “Now I can look at the music book and see it not only as a detail but for what it is how it acts.”

Hampl is aware that she could just right a fictional novel, but she chooses to take the realness of her situation and sort of twist it so that her truth is meaningful to the reader. As she puts it, “Memoir is travel writing, then, notes taken along the way, telling how things looked and what thoughts occurred.”