Life is not a story, or at any rate, not a very good story. It has a beginning and an end, but they’re always exactly the same, Mostly lives are just a whole bunch of middle, and really boring middle at that. You need to edit your life. You need to shape it. But most of all, you need to lie. You need to compress events, conflate people, leave out the stuff that dulls the impact, and put in things that never happened. Show me somebody who has lived a life as interesting and as full of drama—as well-shaped—as any novel, and I will show you the world’s biggest liar. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing.