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Memoirs In Jeannette Walls The Glass Castle

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Imagine one day you meet the most talented hypnotist in the world. This hypnotist tells you he can change your memories without even breaking a sweat. Maybe this sounds like magic or just plain nonsense to you but in reality it isn’t that difficult to tamper with memories. Any time you hear a different telling of an event, even one you witnessed first-hand, your perception of the event changes over and over becoming a conglomeration of everything you’ve heard about the aforementioned event. Memoirs and other pieces of literature written from memory suffer from these easily modified memories and can’t always be trusted to be true. Jeannette Walls’ personal memoir The Glass Castle is a personal retelling of her life story beginning at the age of just three years old. Although most of her personal retelling sounds honest and believable, there are several situations that undermine the credibility of her memories. One situation of note is when Walls lists the feral creatures her …show more content…

Whether memories are changed intentionally or not doesn’t matter; what matters is either way these memories are false and cannot be used as factual source material. Most people, unknowingly, remember things to be more favorable to their self-image and character. These “prestige-enhancing memories” (Wilson) can show up in memoirs and distort our understanding of the authors’ lives and experiences. Some will say that memoirs should be labeled as nonfiction as they are actual events from different points of view. What really needs to be considered in this situation that each different point of view on the event is opinionated to each person that experienced it. Nonfiction is a place without opinion and needs reliable sources of information to base the writings upon. Memoirs are someone’s life in their own opinion and should be labeled as fiction to warn that all events in the work may or may not be

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