Response 4: All Writing is Autobiography

I believe Murray is asking you to reconsider whether the nonfiction you read is all true and whether the fiction you read is all false. He believes that writers always put a little of themselves into their writing, but sometimes it isn’t the whole truth. They change the facts to fit the piece and embellish where necessary to make their writing more interesting or to make the flow of the piece easier to follow. He even states that he “still is not sure about the source of most of my autobiography” (72). All of his pieces are drawn from experiences, but the experiences often blur together. This is shown when Murray states, “My war stories are constructed of what I experience, what I heard later, what the history books say, what I needed to believe to survive and recover – two radically different processes” (72).