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If there be such a thing as degrees of truth, then might I say that the truest parts of this true narrative are those that might most easily be considered as flights of imagination. Or otherwise I might say that my aim has been to tell the truth in all, and in these parts that have the quality that one associates with the novel (where one might say, not: "This is true to life," but "This is true to fiction!") I have been especially careful to be accurate and restrained. I have been so careful that perhaps, without departure from fact, I could have made them seem more like fiction still!

Once upon a time novelists used to append a footnote to some amazing part of their novels to say that it was not, like the rest, out of their imagination, but taken from life. Now, in an era of novel readers, one writing of facts has to make assurance that he is not drawing on his imagination or borrowing from fiction!

I did truly hear Hank chanting Shirley's lyric; we did truly have that grimly pathetic, that pathetically humorous scene in the barroom at North Bend; Hank did truly decide one night, in the interests of my happiness, to slay me, leave my body to the coyotes and set my spirit free from a social system that he saw as not for me, and did verily tramp many a mile in pursuit of me afterwards to express regret for that. I did truly, some years later, see his mother and his early home, just as I describe.