The unreliability of memory is central to Cofer’s storytelling approach. In the Preface she discusses how our memories of childhood are often distorted by time and shaped as much by our imaginations as our actual recollections. However, rather than battling against this fallibility and attempting to make her stories as factually accurate as possible, Cofer embraces it. She declares that she is “not interested in merely ‘canning’ memories” (13) or recounting facts. Instead, she uses memory only as a jumping-off point from which to explore the emotional resonance and interpersonal connections that surround events, employing her imagination as much as her memory.

This belief about the relation between memory and truth becomes a guiding principle for the whole text, which is concerned not with factual accuracy but with striving for a higher “poetic truth” (11). Cofer returns to this theme explicitly in the final chapter, which presents conflicting accounts of an incident without claiming either to be objectively “true.” Her own memory of falling into a fire at her father’s homecoming (discussed in Chapter 4 and in the poem that closes the book) angers her mother, who “wants certain things she believes are true to remain sacred, untouched by my fictions” (163).