Critics of the memoir as a genre often charge it with an inescapable dishonesty: memory is reconstructive, they observe, so any narrative presented as remembered fact must smuggle invention across the border of truth. The complaint proves too much. If the reconstructive character of memory disqualifies the memoir, it equally disqualifies the testimony of witnesses, the reminiscences of historians who lived through their subjects, and indeed all first-person report whatever. A standard that convicts the entire category of remembered speech has not exposed a special vice of the memoir; it has merely described the ordinary condition under which any account of the past is composed and, on the whole, trusted.