Witnessing and Truth: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Jacques Derrida's "Poetics and Politics of Witnessing"

Though Eggers's admissions of fictionalizing parts of his memoir might appear to be a clear violation of the author-reader contract, this indictment assumes that truthful autobiography, and memoir as a subgenre, cannot include imagined or revised content. Rather than defining truthful autobiography as the nearest representation of what happened to the autobiographer … [,] truth in autobiography should be defined by authorial intent to tell the truth rather than as a literal representation of past events.