Roger Collier

T he memoir is one of my favourite literary genres, and I hope to write my own someday, though squeezing a compelling tale from my life won't be easy. I was cursed with a happy childhood. I haven't accomplished anything noteworthy or befriended anyone famous. I haven't had the good fortune to fall into an addiction to triumphantly overcome, though I did, some years back, kick a three-Snickers-a-week habit. Maybe I can get a chapter or two out of that.

To pad my memoir out to book length, however, will take considerable effort. I could conduct research -- visit my hometown, talk to relatives, interview former teachers. I could dig up old letters and photographs and yearbooks. But whatever I'd learn would only confirm what I already know: my life story is as boring as rolled oats.

Perhaps a better writer could do more with such meagre material -- compose pretty sentence after pretty sentence about riding bikes and shooting hoops, find cosmic significance in every scraped knee, every unrequited crush. Hey, I enjoy a little hooptedoodle on the page as much as the next Nabokov fan. It's just not in me to write that way. I need something to work with. So I'll do what many successful memoirists do -- make stuff up.

These are trying times for fabulists, I know. Every other month someone's life story is exposed as fiction. A Jewish girl raised by wolves turns out to be a Catholic girl raised by relatives. A half-Indian foster child who ran drugs in the hood turns out to be an all-white valley girl who attended private school in the 'burbs. A Holocaust survivor who married a fruit-chucking fake Christian turns out to be a Holocaust survivor who ate imaginary apples.

But, unlike them, I won't get caught. Their mistakes make up my what-not-to-do list. I won't, for instance, write about drugs. I won't write about the Holocaust. And, most important, I won't go anywhere near Oprah. You'd think all faux memoirists would know by now that a visit with Ms. Winfrey is a visit with disaster. That woman could turn the phonebook into fiction.

And so what if it did come out that I wasn't raised in an Albuquerque mental institution by former cast members of the 1970 off-Broadway production of Whispers on the Wind. (This is one of several plot lines I'm considering.) Why do people pretend that honesty is so important?

Society would fall apart if people were always honest with each other. If you told a friend what you really thought about his wife/short game/comb-over, you would soon be short one friend. Lies make relationships possible.

Honesty works sometimes, but people expect certain answers to certain questions, and to answer otherwise would be cruel. No mother needs to hear that her baby is ugly. No husband needs to hear that his bedroom skills have slipped from mediocre to poor. No wife needs to hear that her new pants make her bottom look like two hot air balloons trapped beneath cheap denim.

Sure, many people say that honesty is the best policy, but I don't understand how anyone could deny that well-intentioned lies are essential to building strong communities. And let's not forget that many people say, "huanying guanglin," which I also don't understand, nor, I suspect, would anybody else who doesn't speak Mandarin.

We're all liars. Why should we expect memoir writers to be different? Should people be held to a higher standard just because they know a metaphor from a simile? The only difference between a fabulist and a person who says your beef-and-banana casserole is delicious is that one has indigestion.

Faux memoirists could play it safe and market their books as novels, but that would be a disservice to society. Stories of real people who succeed in spite of adversity inspire readers -- give them hope that they, too, might one day escape their sad little lives. They won't, of course, but the hope is nice.

The problem is that most people are petty, selfish, narcissistic dunderheads who couldn't inspire a squirrel to eat an acorn. Enter the fabulist. We need writers to fabricate uplifting true stories to fill the inspiration void. It's philanthropy, really.

I hope my future memoir will inspire readers. I hope it will show them that anything is possible. Most of all, I hope my story will make people realize that just because you were raised by heavily medicated singers and dancers doesn't mean you can't one day be king of Albania.