ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the historical interpretation and understanding of Philip Roth's autobiography, entitled The Facts (1988), in which, by his own account, he has temporarily set aside his vocation as fiction-writer and elected instead to tell the putatively factual story of his life without the embellishments and adornments of art. In writing fiction, there is apparently the need to clothe the facts on some level. It is an act of depersonalization, that allows for a measure of self-expression while at the same time removing the burden of self-disclosure. Although author is not particularly interested in reducing fiction writing to some sort of therapeutic motive, people can see how the element of disguise might be therapeutic. The main point to be extracted from the brief digression into historiography is that writing an autobiography may indeed be more like writing fiction than Roth initially suggests: it is a sequence of stories, as he himself puts it, that together encompass.
