would be the right place to begin. In the process of writing—not just a memoir, but short stories and novels, too—I find that my conception of the project changes tremendously as I'm writing.

When I begin something, I rarely think, “this is where it's going to be at the end of the day.” Two, three, four or even five years down the line, when I've finished all the revisions and I'm ready to say “this is a book,” it's going to be very different from when I started.

Where to begin is actually a decision you make several times along the way in the process of changing things. You have to harmonize the beginning with the rest of the book. You discover not only the beginning but also the rest of the book, the rest of the story, by writing it.

When I'm writing out of memory, a great deal of material comes up; more than I could ever include in a book. Every memory is connected to another memory, and that's connected to some other memory. You get as much of it down as you can that seems even vaguely to the point, then when you proceed further in the writing, you begin to understand more of what you're really trying to say.

You're not just going to write down, “Well this happened to me, and then this happened to me, and then this happened to me.” You're trying to discern a pattern from these experiences. What is significant about what happened? How would some of these experiences tell us something—not only about one's self, but about human beings in general. What happens to us? How do we respond? Is there something in what you're putting down that could be learned and useful to other people?

So the patterns in what you eventually discern in your own experience will determine what you put in and leave out. You don't leave things out necessarily because you're embarrassed by them, but you also don't put things in just because they're horrible. You don't say “Oh, this is something horrible I did; I better put this in or I'm dishonest.”

You're trying to figure out how to present the story of your life as your memory tells it to you, but only those parts of your life that make up a coherent shape—and maybe events don't really have a coherent shape, but our memories give them one, and suggest those shapes to us—and that's what tells us what to put in and leave out. As well as where to begin and where to end when you've got it all down and you're putting it all together. Then you begin to see—this is where the story begins; this is where it really ends.

A review in Critique magazine criticized you for not including the current parts of your life in This Boy's Life, for ending the book while you're still a child. Readers know that Vietnam is coming, but you don't take them any further.

Things have to end somewhere. Look again at the title of that book; it doesn't say This Man's Life, it says This Boy's Life. I was concerned not to just say “This happened to me, and then this happened to me, and then I became this and then I became that.” It was a portrait of an American boyhood. At the end of that book, that boy is no longer a boy, he's becoming a young man.

We see that until then, he's operated with a net under him all the time, and that net has been his mother's steadfastness. At the end of that book, he's going off, and his mistakes will have consequences. We understand even that they will be so consequential that they will land him in the Army, and send him overseas.

But nevertheless, that phase in his life is over at the end of the book, and I think it would have been a mistake to continue it. I know a lot of people thought that I somehow owed it to readers to let them know how I got from point A to point B. Well, I don't think I owe readers that. What I owe readers is an honest accounting of how a certain phase of this boy's life was lived out, and how this person survived it. Particularly, I was interested in the problem of identity in that book: How do we become who we are? The kinds of patterns I kept seeing in the writing of that book had to do with invention and imagination, as a way of suggesting to us who we are; trying on different poses.

I was much more interested in the patterns of behavior that suggested the future writer, things I had forgotten until I was writing the book: the way I used to change my name all the time, invent histories for myself, even to the final act of writing a number of recommendation letters [to gain admission to prep school] for myself. In fact, I created a fictional character. It was quite a work of fiction when taken all together.

To ask, “How did he become a writer?”—I think the answer is very much in this book. I didn't need to say, “I published my first story in The Atlantic and then I got a book contract.” That's not how you become a writer. You become a writer in your childhood. You become a writer by thinking and seeing the world in certain ways, and behaving in certain ways, and I think that's all there.

This Boy's Life reads much like a novel; it's very beautifully written with wonderful metaphors.

The intention was to write the book as I do my fiction, with as much clarity as I could, with a language that would not compromise the sense of the boy's autonomy or integrity, to give a vivid sense of the person it's about. And in a way, the voice stands in for me. I don't come in and say, “Here I am; this is who I am now.” But it's clearly an adult telling the story of a boy. So it's a highwire act; you have the adult voice telling the story of the boy he used to be. I didn't want to infringe on the boy, or seem like I'm bullying him, so a certain reticence is required as well.

Whether it reads like a novel to someone is beyond my control. I think the important thing to the memoirist is to keep it straight what they're doing: If they're writing a memoir, then they're writing a memoir. If they're writing a novel, then they're writing a novel.

But if you see patterns in your life that appear to be novelistic, so be it. It's your life. A lot of us see our lives in the patterns of narrative, especially those who write a lot. When I started that book, I was 40, 41 years old, and I had been writing fiction since I was 16. So I had the habits of 25 years—not of making things up, but about structure, framing things, language. So a lot of what goes on in that book are probably things that are unconscious, and things I wasn't particularly aware of, but come from the habits of a lifetime.

In the book's opening you write “my mother thinks that a dog I describe as ugly was actually quite handsome.” That sentence seems to speak to issues of honesty and the integrity of memory.

That doesn't have so much to do with honesty as differences of opinion. And there's bound to be a lot of that. We all see our pasts differently, even pasts that we've shared with other people will be seen differently by those people. You know how it is, when you sit around a table with a bunch of relatives, and you start talking about things that happened 10, 15 years ago, and how ever many people are there is how many stories are there. So we all construct a different story about the past.

If you're writing something you're going to call a memoir, I think you owe it to your readers to be as honest as you can be. And that includes sometimes putting things in a memoir that may not make you proud, but are an essential part of the story. Otherwise you end up with a book in which you're the one who always has the virtue while everyone else does everything wrong. You're the one who always says the smart things while everybody else says dumb things. That's just a way of going back and doing right what you didn't do right the first time. But it isn't very interesting.

We all know that we were complicit in the things that happen to us; nobody is a pure victim—well, maybe small children. More often than not, most of us had something to do with the things that have gone wrong with our lives. To understand that is as important as trying to get even with someone for the things they might have done.

I think at its best, a memoir is a tremendous instrument for understanding oneself and one's history, but you must be willing to acknowledge when your history wasn't what you wish it was.

Given that today's literary memoir is so different from autobiography, it seems that having some story to tell is far more important to a book than a life's particular events. Do you think everyone has a memoir inside them?

It isn't so much the shape of the story as it is how you see your life. Everyone's life has the potential for drama, and has had drama in it, and oddity; if you see them. It all depends on how you see your life.

Some people live the most extraordinarily interesting lives, and have no idea. For example, when I was a reporter at The Washington Post in 1972, I wanted to interview people who were famous for something for a very brief time, find out what happened to them since, then have them look back on that event.

One of the people I rooted out was a guy who'd been on the Hindenburg when it exploded. He jumped from the gondola, a fall of about three stories, broke his leg, and was found by his servant. He and this servant would whistle particular tunes to each other, and that's how they found each other in crowds. So the servant whistled, and the man whistled back, and the servant came over and took him to safety.

And this guy was so boring. He had no idea that what he had lived through was one of the most extraordinary incidents of the century, or if he did know it, he only knew it in a factual way, not in a dramatic way. He didn't understand the human scale of this; how complex and interesting a story it was. And when he said to me, “Oh, it didn't have anything else to do with the rest of my life,” all I could think was, “Well, if it didn't then you're a fool.”

It really is a question of the way people see their lives; not so much the lives they've had. I know people who've had uneventful lives in conventional terms who can tell their stories in such a way that you're excited and amused by them.

In In Pharaoh's Army people are sometimes described as looking like food. Does the symbolism in your work …

People are described as looking like food? Really? Maybe I have cannibalistic urges that are showing up that way. I've really never noticed that. That's funny; I'll have to look.

Things come out in books that writers are unaware of. I've had it pointed out to me, for example, that dogs meet very unhappy fates in my work. And it's true. There are a lot of dogs, and none of them end well. That isn't something I set out to do; it's just because dogs don't end well, especially the ones I've known.

Readers who want to make something of that are perfectly in their rights to read it that way. It doesn't matter if the writer meant for it to be there or not.

Do you use specific repeating symbols?

In memoir particularly, I don't put things in on purpose. But I noticed, for example, in This Boy's Life there's a lot of singing going on. By the time I wrote the last draft of that book, I was very well aware of when people were doing it, and that it did create a certain mood at different times. It begins with the boy and his mother in the car singing a song, and it ends with the boy and his friend singing a song. Music was something that sustained me as a child. I wanted readers to be aware of that, even if they didn't realize it. It affects the sense of mood and where the person is.

Do you have any final words of advice to beginning writers?

Do it. Work hard at it. But do it.