Reader Beware

I agree with the assertion that all autobiography is fiction. How could it be otherwise? Even if the author is sincere, he or she has a point of view, is rarely entirely altruistic, cannot be perfectly objective, is relying in part on memory, and is engaging in creative processes by choosing the aspects of his or her life to highlight and by transposing experience into written word.

My blog is not meant to be an autobiography. For example, I do not write about about living family members (one exception: I wrote six lines about my aunt Lucy, in my entry commemorating her daughter, my late cousin Missy). 

Although I try to be meticulous in my writing per se, my blog is prey to the same fictionalizing forces that affect autobiography. As a result, I can see that it downplays the day-to-day logistics and humiliations of living with cancer and cancer treatments and the cowardly horror with which I contemplate the process of dying of cancer. And there are certainly other ways, including ones of which I am not aware, in which I am seeking to cast myself in a favorable light in my blog.