In 1969, I was working shifts with fairly irregular hours and I needed to keep track of what shifts I had on which days, so as I could then plan my social life around them. To this end, I kept a little red diary, just an appointment book, which I hung on to, with the intention of making it into a story one day. This was not a diary in the sense that it systematically recorded my daily feelings and activities. It contained only the briefest of entries: times, venues, people. Time passed, and the story never got written, and I came to forget a lot of the reality that lay behind those short annotations. So I had to invent, re-create, and make things up. So it's a sort of a fake, or at least unreliable, memoir. I call it a memoir-based novella.