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At least three books have recently been published claiming to be memoirs but which turned out to be fiction. If a reader enjoyed the book, why would she be offended when she discovered it was fiction? But she would be, no doubt. She would, however, not be offended when a novel turned out to be mostly autobiographical or borrowed from someone else's experience, a roman à clef, say, or an historical novel. We expect a certain kind of truth from a novel, another kind of truth from a memoir.

When we are reading a novel, we know how we are getting into another's mind, and we know what part of that mind we are in - the writer's imagination. When I write, I can't allow myself any restrictions on this imagination. For example, I can keep confidences in regular life, but one time my imagination borrowed from my memory a troublesome detail. My first novel thus caused me no end of worry because one of the characters had a secret that belonged to my aunt. I swore my father to secrecy about the novel's publication, but after a while, he told someone who told someone else, and soon my aunt knew about it. I was greatly relieved when she was pleased rather than offended after she read it. I could not, however, have revealed the secret in any other way.

In a memoir, we expect to be completely in another part of the writer's brain, the memory. If to make myself seem important, I lie in my memoir that I am sheltering a significant refugee, the public is offended or thinks I am crazy. But in my novel The Irrational Doorways of Mr. Gerard, although a reader might find that scenario implausible, he would accept it as coming from my imagination. In a memoir we expect not only the telling of real activities but also what the writer felt about those activities, about the people involved, how he dealt with problems. "If I got through it, so can you," is one moral. Or, "On the whole I find the world to be a jolly place." These lessons from life are inspirational only if the writer has actually travelled through the life he has portrayed.

In a recent New Yorker essay, Jill Lepore writes about the distinction between history and the novel. "Historians and novelists are kin"¦ but they're more like brothers who throw food at each other than like sisters who borrow each other's clothes." Both the novel and history as it is now written were invented in the 18th century. Novelists would pretend their work was "true." Lepore quotes Aristotle on the difference between history and poetry, "The one tells what has happened, the other the kind of things that can happen." Many novelists have the experience of writing about an event, only to have a similar event happen later.

Lepore repeats the theory that women fastened onto the novel in order to tell their own stories. History is only about famous men, about wars and grand events but fiction can chronicle ordinary life. I open a book of Alice Munro stories at random, put my finger down, and extract a detail: "She often wears black pants - as she does today - and an ivory silk shirt, and sometimes a black jacket." This strikes us as authentic, a "telling" detail, as it usually described; at a given year a woman of a certain kind would wear such an outfit. There is not the swaggering drama of an historian of World War II quoting General Douglas McArthur, "I will return." But as a reviewer wrote, Munro is "the living writer most likely to be read in a hundred years."

The memoirist would not record what she wore on an ordinary day because she is looking back on the big picture, not the daily as in a diary. She extracts from her memory what she deems important, but if nothing dramatic has happened to her, she might imagine more excitement. The temptation to call her imagined life a memoir is great, especially if it records a rise from poverty or sexual abuse. The fiction market is languishing; the non-fiction market is thriving. "Readers want practical titles, and there's a collective hunger for books that offer help and advice," said one editor; they want "books that address spirituality and change," said another editor.

A reader sent me this quotation from Paul Tillich in response to my last two columns: "Language"¦ has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word 'solitude' to express the glory of being alone." Enjoying literature is different from enjoying other forms of art in that reading merges companionship and solitude. Or even, perhaps, companionship and loneliness. In either case, we must trust our companion.

Nancy Bauer is an arts columnist who lives in Frede-ricton. She can be reached at wbauer@nbnet.nb.ca.