Maybe is a more resonant, coherent, and ambitious work than its scattered narrative at first suggests….

If we look at Maybe as a speculative inquiry into the nature of truth and of memory, a way of asking what can we know about another person or our own lives, then Hellman's choice of relatively marginal central figures serves to reinforce her interest in how memory works as well as what it recalls. But Maybe is more than an exercise in epistemology…. Despite, or perhaps because of, their marginality Hellman needs to know who the Camerons were to know herself…. (p. 5)

[The] structural disorder of the narrative may be read as a thematic statement about the tension between the need for order and intelligibility as it conflicts with the desire to find the truth….

Maybe … is nearly as much a self-reflexive study of autobiography as it is the story of Hellman's encounters with the Camerons and related acquaintances. As such it may frustrate the Hellman reader's well-based expectations of stylish and affectionate portraits of her family, lovers, and close friends. However, what Maybe loses in grace and assurance is more than compensated for by the invitation issued by its formal and thematic self-consciousness to a more strenuous level of critical inquiry into Hellman's entire autobiographical corpus….

Maybe expresses conditionality and possibility, past or future. Used as the title of the fourth book of memoirs of a writer now in her eighth decade, it evokes the idea of alternate versions of self and experience, the attempt to avoid autobiographical closure by engaging in revisionist, perhaps even fictive, readings of the past. One way to resist the claustrophobic shrinking in of failing eyesight and the loss of friends that Hellman describes in Maybe is to speculate on what might have been. (p. 6)

Maybe looks back at the darkness of Hellman's personal past, at shadowy corners peopled by cruel, dishonest, dissipated drifters and, most significantly, at Hellman's own failures of attention, nerve, and moral choice. In Scoundrel Time friends and acquaintances fail her, but she herself is not implicated: in Maybe she finds herself guilty, not of political, but of emotional and moral cowardice. Having confronted evil in her colleagues in Scoundrel Time, now she finds it closer to home. Maybe is confessional, but not cheaply or self-indulgently so. For a woman who has in all her previous art made so much of honor, to convict herself, even of the dishonor of association, of inattention, of having been gulled by evil, is a genuine act of courage and honesty.

The revelation of a less flattering part of her past goes hand in hand with increased openness about death and the fear of dying. While in her previous memoirs Hellman resisted narrative closure as a strategy to avoid the question of her own end, here she confronts directly her lack of control over time. Her failure to unravel the mystery of the Camerons is emblematic of the ultimate loss of time passed, and now, with old age encroaching, the past becomes proportionately even larger and more significant. She presents herself, not as the unfinished woman, the revisionist artist, or the noble veteran of ideological battle, but much less heroically, as an old woman with failing eyesight, weakened body, and, most frightening, what she fears is an undependable memory….

The writing of Maybe may then be seen as a quest after more precise knowledge of that blackness and of Hellman's own fear that she will lose herself if she loses her past…. She realizes that the incoherence of her story comes not from the failure of her memory, but from her earlier failure to see and repudiate the incoherence and "blackness" of the Camerons….

However, despite her efforts at truth and honesty, Hellman still engages in a misleading bit of pretense and denial. As if to defend herself against the central baring of her self, she writes with an almost parodic toughness and disregard for the niceties of diction. This style functions self-protectively, as a way of distancing the explosive material in Maybe, and also dramatically, the writer's quest to solve the mystery…. Maybe leaves us with Hellman's instinct that the "missing pieces" are "black," at least for Carter Cameron. She cannot know the Camerons because they are evil and hence unreceptive to the order and salvation of understanding. But to resolve her crisis of despair she must accept and affirm the darkness of her past as well as the triumphs of love and honor which she celebrated in her earlier memoirs. (p. 7)