Letter to the Editor (unpublished) The New Yorker, February 2010 Dear Editor: Daniel Mendelsohn's piece on the popularity of memoirs ("But Enough About Me") only begins to touch on the blurring of fact and fiction in writing. His piece misses what underlies all texts—namely, that they are constructs. Or in other words, writing is not "lived life"; writing is a series of words that take on patterns and variations forming recognizable structures, such as "narrative" or "drama." Ultimately, the issue is not how we are to go about splitting the hairs of "truth" or "fact" from "fiction" or "lies," or even why it's necessary to do so, but rather how all writing—memoir or fiction—is the product of the imagination. If "memory," as Giambasttisa Vico wrote in the 18th Century, "is the same as imagination," and if, "imagination," as William Blake wrote in the same century, "is not a state; it is human existence itself," then perhaps we should start to accept the notion that our very lives—past, present, future—are pure products of the imagination where questions of fact and fiction have always happily blurred. Sincerely, Mark Yakich Associate Professor of English Loyola University New Orleans