Great minds

Sheesh!

Mary and I made a Half Price Books run this evening and one of my finds was a John Irving anthology which would have been a steal at three times the three bucks they charged me.

So I’m thumbing through this find and I read the first paragraph of Trying to Save Piggy Sneed:

“This is a memoire but please understand that (to any writer with a good imagination) all memoirs are false. A fiction writer’s memory is an especially imperfect provider of detail; we can always imagine a better detail than the one we can remember. The correct detail is rarely, exactly, what happened; the most truthful detail is what could have happened, or what should have…being a writer is a strenuous marriage between careful observation and just as carefully imagining the truths you haven’t had the opportunity to see.”

Now, I have to admit I was a bit taken aback at the cheek of the guy, so shamelessly plagiarizing my comments in an earlier blog. But then, I realized that the fact of my finding this anthology in a clearance bin at HPB probably means that the Irving work predates mine own musings on the topic in these virtual pages.

I suppose I should be thrilled at Irving’s implied inclusion of moi in the “us” of writers with good imaginations. I wonder how he knew.