In Julian Barnes’ 2011 novel, The Sense of an Ending, the protagonist asks, “This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents — were they the stuff of Literature?”
While working on a memoir, a writer may wonder if she must exaggerate her life, romanticise it, or paint herself, the protagonist, as a hero, as fiction often tends to do, to depict Life with a capital ‘L’. In Called By The Hills: A Home in the Himalaya, Anuradha Roy writes her first non-fiction book, a memoir on her life in the Himalaya, in the town of Ranikhet in Uttarakhand, but she chooses understatement over hyperbole.
