No two such monuments adorn our literary landscape. And ‘Molly Benison’ too. There are echoes in her of more than one (I hope) of the rackety beauties of her period, but which of them it she? If any? Is the reader to assume that the whole of this book, with the exception of some decorative details from my childhood, is pure invention, and that the palaver about my ‘novel’ is only a bit of fashionable fooling around with notions of truth and fiction, fun for some, tedious for most? Not really. It is all as true as I have been able to make it. I said this on page one, but the phrase is of course ambiguous. Even supposing I had the literary ability to get the whole truth down, there would still have been areas in which I was not able (in another sense) to tell the truth. As I have explained, it all began when I was writing a quite different book. I was then asked to recall some trivial details about my childhood and found myself almost unable to do so because of a mysterious blanking-out of memory.
