Vivian Gornick defends her inventiveness with detail in her memoir on the basis that better informed readers would understand why she did it: "I, a memoirist who composed (composed, mind you, not invented) a narrative drawn entirely from the materials of my own experience, am being compared to a psychopath who invented a memoir of testament out of whole cloth [Binjamin Wilkomirski]; a historian who is accused of incorporating other people's work into her own without attribution [Doris Goodwin]; and a dishonest newspaper reporter who made up interviews in the New York Times [Jayson Blair]. It seems to me that these analogies are proof, if proof be needed, that memoir writing is a genre still in need of an informed readership." Given that she also used composite characters in her reporting, I guess the Village Voice needs a more informed readership as well.
A memoirist defends her words [Salon]

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