'Philip Roth once quipped that ‘Memoirs lie and fiction tells the truth’ (quoted by Drabble 2010: 110). Life-writing is bedeviled with issues of truth-telling, not to mention problems with ‘narcissism, the confessional impulse, sincerity, the hubris of assessing oneself with finality’ (Powers 2016: 323). Far from being a simple act of remembering and reclaiming the personal past self in words, writing memoir needs careful negotiation with notions of truth / fiction, reader accountability and how history and the ‘self’ is constructed. Life writing, Margaret Drabble goes as far to say, is a ‘dangerous game’ (Drabble 2010: 111).' (Introduction)