The central figure of ["Maybe," a] strange short memoir (if it can be called such), is not its ostensible subject, Sarah Cameron, nor the memoirist, Lillian Hellman, but the elusive, mutilated, often reeling character of memory itself. Again and again Miss Hellman tries to corner memory, forcing it to reveal the truth about the people and events she is trying to make sense of. Important epistemological questions are suggested: How valid is what we know—or think we know—about the people who dropped in and out of our lives in the past? How can we tell where memory blends into fantasy, producing a composite that takes on different shapes at different times, according to our needs? At the end of Miss Hellman's struggle with these questions, we have to settle for some very dusty answers; meanwhile we have been entertained, dismayed and, above all, tantalized….

Lillian Hellman has created [a very interesting persona] for herself in these pages. She portrays herself as truculent, sardonic and (better than most around her) able to hold her liquor. Sexually independent herself, she is nonetheless caustic with her longtime lover Dashiell Hammett for letting strange ladies drift casually in and out of his whiskey-soaked Hollywood existence. The conversations of this sharp-tongued, easily angered woman tend to be sparring matches that modulate into gentle banter when she is with someone like "Dash," for whom she feels strong affection. The recorded or reconstructed talk is permeated with a fine period flavor, full of goddamns and wisecracks, with situations referred to as "nutty" and people as "nuts."…

But absorbing as this autobiographical material is, it does not compensate, in my opinion, for the emptiness at the heart of the book. Miss Hellman fails to bring Sarah Cameron into existence as even a remotely comprehensible woman. The evidence is so scattered, so inconsistent, so blurred by time and alcohol, that we are left with a wraith too insubstantial to evoke even a sense of mystery, much less to support a valid point about the ultimate unknowability of figures in our past. Miss Hellman is aware of her problem…. Halfway through "Maybe" she admits that she doesn't know much of what really happened and "never tried to find out." (p. 3)

Why, if so little could be known, did Lillian Hellman choose to make Sarah the object of her search into lost time?… Still stranger is the reluctance to establish facts and dates that should have been easily available with a little digging. (pp. 3, 36)

What are we to make of this? Mere carelessness? Or a deliberate attempt to scramble the time-sequence in order to thicken the unreality?…

Even if it were intended as fiction or as fictionalized memoir, the Sarah-story still would not add up to anything significant. Facts and dates do not constitute the "truth," but they are useful in anchoring an otherwise free-floating subjectivity. By surrendering prematurely to the impossibility of getting things straight—or at least straighter—Lillian Hellman has, I think, lost a chance to make "Maybe" the fascinating encounter with memory and time that it might have been. Despite the subtleties of its voice, its strong period quality and its brave forays into the self, the book remains, disappointingly, less a memoir than a shaggy-dog story. (p. 36)