Many masterpieces of "creative nonfiction" have been criticized for sacrificing truth for a good read, and they include Norman Mailer's "Executioner's Song," Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood" and Joseph Mitchell's "Old Mr. Flood."

But the memoir, in particular, seems to be the most factually fudged genre of nonfiction writing.

In 2001, Jennifer Lauck's wildly successful childhood memoir, "Blackbird," came under fire from her own family; her stepbrother chronicled 100 errors he said he found in the book. Many modern memoirists hedge their bets; Dave Eggers deliberately called his book "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" fiction, though it closely mirrored his own life. Rick Marin, whose "Cad" came out earlier this year, has blithely told reporters it is a "lightly fictionalized memoir." And Augusten Burroughs included the following note in his second memoir, "Dry," which came out in June: "This memoir is based on my experiences over a 10-year period. Names have been changed, characters combined and events compressed. Certain episodes are imaginative re-creation, and those episodes are not intended to portray actual events." That prompted the Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley to fume: "There's a word for that: fiction."

In response, Burroughs told Salon, "It's weird to me that the old man at the Washington Post would think the disclaimer in the beginning of 'Dry' somehow means I made everything up. What I did was make up the beer commercial I talk about in the book and merge a couple of ad people together into one. Ad people are all pretty similar, so who cares? Because I changed these small details, I had to put that disclaimer at the front of the book, to make my publisher comfortable with the fact that these things were fabricated." Burroughs added, "If I were going to make up a story, I certainly wouldn't mine such tired, overworked territory as 'recovery.'"

Fabrications happen "all the time" in memoirs, according to Charles McGrath, the editor of the New York Times Book Review. McGrath says that in an ideal world, journalistic standards would apply to memoirs, though they frequently don't. A memoir ought to be as true as it can possibly be and if it is not the reader should be alerted to that fact.

Walt Harrington, a former Washington Post writer who has written five books, including a recently published memoir, "The Everlasting Stream: A True Story of Rabbits, Guns, Friendship and Family," is a member of the Goucher MFA faculty. He had attended the Goucher talk, and had questioned Gornick intensely about her ethics. He still seemed frustrated afterward.

Gornick, he said, is a "great writer and a great thinker" whose standard is "acceptable among many people writing nonfiction." Wouldn't her "willfully ignorant" readers feel tricked when they discovered parts of a work they thought was true was, in fact, not? Harrington said he once spoke with an editor in a prominent publishing house about the shape his future memoir might take. The editor had wanted Harrington to make the piece more "story-like." "He wanted me to trust my memory," Harrington said, "which is to me a code for 'You can make it up as long as you don't tell anybody.'"

Harrington chose a different publishing house, the Atlantic Monthly Press, and said he purposefully put "True Story" in the subtitle.

Gornick, meanwhile, chooses to leaves it up to the reader to decide. "I cannot defend it, " she said of her writing. "The writing has to defend itself."

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