“I must say a few words about memory. It is full of holes. If you were to lay it out upon a table, it would resemble a scrap of lace. I am a lover of history…[but] history has one flaw. It is a subjective art, no less so than poetry or music…The historian writes a truth. The memoirist writes a truth. The novelist writes a truth. And so on. My mother, we both know, wrote a truth in The 19th Wife—a truth that corresponded to her memory and desires. It is not the truth, certainly not. But a truth, yes. . . . Her book is a fact. It remains so, even if it is snowflaked with holes.”
— David Ebershoff, The 19th Wife