The Glass Castle #1 (reflections on truth-telling)

In many sections of The Glass Castle, it seems that the author is exaggerating about what's happening. Like when she moves to Phoenix to live in her grandma's house as she was giving all these extravagant details on her neighbors, what the house looked like, and that it was infested with mites that they kept creating holes in the floors.

I think many of the details are exaggerated or made up for example; when the author writes that her mom holds up a dish to show how them how to tell what the finest quality of china is. These details seem so little to remember from when you were an adolescent. Also, your brain has to make space for new knowledge/memories that it discards the ones that you don’t need to remember. That's a reason is why I think she made it up because she ended up writing this when she got older. These small little details were probably insignificant to her as a child, so later on she forgot about it. The fact that she also lived there for a short amount of time makes me wonder really how much she remembers about living there. When the author exaggerates the story I think it's to convey what they were going through. With fiction an author can use as many details as he/she wants to paint a beautiful picture, but writing a memoir is different to me. Writing a memoir that tells the reader what they’re going through without lying about what happened seems tricky.

The advantages of using these techniques in a memoir is that it creates a story that has and uses more imagery. If authors didn’t exaggerate or make up any details in the book then how would the reader be able to engross themselves in the book. If the author didn’t have these details because they wanted to stick to just the truth, then I believe the writing would be more elusive. Maybe some of the details of how the author feels is made. Nevertheless, the advantage to that is it gives the reader a sense of metacognition, but with the advantages there are also some disadvantages with using these techniques. If an author can make up or create any details they need or want in the book then how do the readers know what’s the truth and what’s not. I like to think that the authors wouldn’t lie about what happened in there life to make it seem more pretentious than it actually is.