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Francis Dumaurier's avatar

Public recognition of one's errors is a huge quality, no matter what the context actually is, and I tip my hat to you for doing this.

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Melissa Knox's avatar

Oh, we all make mistakes. Made a worse one last night--stepped on someone's foot in my tap dance class. In tap shoes. The woman has a bruise.

Lemon in water: not too controversial. You remedied by re-writing. But hey, then there's memoir! So many writers I know have had the same experience: you research your subject into the ground--in my case I sometimes took passages straight out of my journals, where I'd written down conversations right after they happened, or even as they were happening. The family somehow finds the (tiny little publisher, not very well publicized) book and claims the writer is delusional and hateful and wildly inventive. I love a quotation from Salman Rushdie, recently used by Shalom Auslander in his new memoir, Feh: "Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless."

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