If your narrator has got a bad memory, you are supposed to be a good writer. With everyday talk of memory and the doings of unconscious, the tenor of fiction and non-fiction writings has altogether changed, and the commingling of reality and fantasy is not only ignorable but also desirable.

Now, if you want to be a good writer, write as elusively as possible. Leave as much to the imagination of the reader as you can afford because the onus of the credibility of texts has shifted to what they call readers’ response. What is of prime importance is the interpretive potential of the text. To add, the rubrics of ‘the unreliability of language’ and ‘contingence of meanings’ have stretched the frontiers of fiction beyond national boundaries and native cultural locations. The art of literary writing seems to be hinged around the notion that it is the modes of remembrance and presentation of life that count, not life itself.

The epigraph of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s autobiography Living to Tell the Tale reads: "Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it". Coupled with this should be Marquez’s tribute to his story-telling grandmother: "It’s possible to get away with anything as long as you make it believable. That is something my grandmother taught me".

Given Marquez’s enormous magical realism corpus, the contemporary readers believe in his epigraph without a crease on their brows. This could not have worked well in the eighteenth and nineteenth century realist fiction that placed a larger premium on presentation of life as close to reality as possible. But realism has almost grown to be an aversion in current publication industry. Even books by inspirational speakers sell only when they hit the abnormal and the non-conformist.

The popularity of life writings/narratives is because of the protean position of memory or the unconscious which, according to Lacan, is structured like a text. The autobiographical narrators are known for their un/reliability and that is what makes these texts more and more readable. With hermeneutics galore, life comes through to contemporary consumers of such texts in its myriad and wondrous shades. Child narrators, in particular, have been used by the twentieth and twenty first century writers as antidotes to realist fiction.

In their book, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, celebrated theorists of life narrative studies, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson hold that when a retrospective narrative of the past has to be told, the present has to be situated within that experiential history, and memory, at that time, serves as a source of meaning-making [paraphrased]. In the course of remembrance of things, reality has to be filtered through the narrator’s memory and, in this process, it morphs into something open to multiple angles of reading.

Bapsi Sidhwa’s much-read Cracking India, formerly Ice-Candy Man, is narrated by a polio-stricken child protagonist who is five when the novel opens and almost eight when it ends. Lenny admits that her ‘memory demands poetic licence’. Since partition narratives are known for exaggeration and extenuation on both sides of the divide, Sidhwa’s novel fits into the contemporary scheme of publishing industry because of its rich interpretive potential.

Other novels like Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird also present an admixture of dream and reality through unreliable child narrators (Oskar and Scout respectively) whose memories don’t serve them well. But, instead of being described as flaws in the novels, the narrators’ handicaps become their strong points and get them more and more readership. Lee’s novel won her Pulitzer Prize and the British librarians ranked it ahead of the Bible in 2006. Smith and Watson also explain models of spatial and temporal memory and hold that space memories may fall into decay but remain unchanged; on the other hand, the temporal memories bring forth "ever different memorial configurations and an ever newly shaped self". That is why a mixture of spatial and temporal memories flooding the minds of narrators of autobiographies and autobiographical fiction has the potential to dent reality accordingly and make it irresistibly gripping.

The art of popular writers like Marquez, Italo Calvino, Fuentes, Haruki Murakami, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, and Isabel Allende, to name a few, consists in realising the significance of a memory capable of messing up reality, as it suits their ironical and artful presentation of socio-political life. Marquez presents a fictional account of the 1928 banana massacre (when Marquez was only a year old) at the hands of Columbian government forces in One Hundred Years of Solitude with the same luxury of using memory at will and exaggerates the numbers of the workers killed to three thousand.

He shares why he did that in Living to Tell the Tale: "Later, I spoke with survivors and witnesses and searched through newspaper archives and official documents, and I realised that truth did not lie anywhere. Conformists said, in effect, that there had been no deaths. Those at the other extreme affirmed without a quaver in their voices that there had been more than a hundred….And so my version was lost forever at some improbable point between the two extremes….This was why I kept the number of the dead at three thousand, in order to preserve the epic proportions of the drama…" (Ch. 2, p.62-3).

Be it autobiographical fiction or a life narrative, good writing has come to depend on a "bad" memory or "badly" remembered reality or history. That is why literary writings are close to journalistic writings these days in which the same data or information is interpreted, analysed, and recycled in various way. The journalistic and literary writings or documentaries on or around the 9/11 genre also testify to this view. The art of remembering is widely different in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, John Updike’s Terrorist, and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, and so is their impact. The unstable reality of 9/11 and its potential for differential remembrance and presentation, like holocaust narratives, have provided the biggest boom to the publishing industry in recent times. The reason, above all political considerations, is contemporary readers’ desire for a chameleonic reality.