When I was 11, with the haircut of a Hanson brother and the physique of a ferret, Olivia Wilde had a crush on me. This isn't quite so strange as it sounds, because she was not at the time Olivia Wilde, international movie star. She was Olivia, a 10-year-old girl with a lunchbox.
In keeping with the ethos of prepubescent crushes, we never exchanged so much as a hug or a Valentine. It is, I have to admit, virtually certain that she doesn't even remember me. Children develop crushes as arbitrarily as food preferences.
Nevertheless, I rarely miss an opportunity to bring up my brush with celebrity. Her Revlon ad will come on the TV, or I'll walk past a magazine store in which she's gazing out sultrily from a patchwork of covers, and my mouth will hardly have opened before my wife assures me that yes, I have in fact told her about Olivia Wilde before. I get occasional e-mails from middle-school friends who wouldn't recognize me on the street that say not much more than, Remember when Olivia Wilde had a crush on you? I write back with the speed and assurance of an athlete signing an autograph.
But I seem to have passed some critical, unfortunate threshold — I've been pointing out for so long that she once had a crush on me that the pointing out of it has now become more vivid to me than the crush itself. Which is to say that I've begun, however slightly, to doubt the veracity of my memory. Maybe it was just that I had a crush on her? Maybe it was that she smiled in a particularly nonhostile way at a time when boy-girl relations were still perilous? How, exactly, would I remember her having a crush, if I don't remember any particular expression of it? Is it possible that what I remember is merely some friend of mine telling me she had a crush?
This is, happily, a mystery upon whose resolution almost literally nothing depends. But the underlying mental habit — replacing multifarious actual experience with simplified, and possibly falsified, story — is a dangerous one. To be a writer is to spend a good chunk of your day processing raw experience into narrative, and if my inner factory has become overgenerous with the additives and preservatives, I'd like at least to serve my artificially flavored memories knowingly.
William Maxwell wrote, "In talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw." I misunderstood this sentence, when I first read it, as a statement about the fallibility of memory; now I see it as a statement about the distorting power of speech — or of speech's pretentious cousin, writing. Because one of the strangest things I've learned about being a fiction writer — particularly one who has been known to write autobiographically — is how the things you write begin to blend with, and then replace, the things you experienced.
I have occasionally begun to tell a story about the summer I worked at the Central Park Zoo, only to realize, a few sentences in, that what I'm describing didn't happen to me; it happened to a character in a book I wrote. I was a zookeeper for only a couple of months, but I wrote about it for a couple of years. The telling overwrote the experience. When we write about a memory, we're painting a landscape onto the window through which we're looking out.
Even those of us who have never sat down at a keyboard have experienced the mind's slightly alarming facility for retracing even the most lightly worn of paths. I could never memorize a script, but I can, and often do, find myself repeating a story very nearly verbatim to one friend and then another, merely because my mind and tongue have once gone to the trouble of giving it a particular shape. The telling replaces the thing told about, and next thing you know you're stopping to point at a poster for "The Incredible Burt Wonderstone," asking if you've already mentioned a certain childhood crush.
So, finally, in the innermost, least word-corrupted corner of my mind, I imagine some thick-necked detective leaning toward me across an interrogation table. The hour is late, and the time for nonsense has passed.
Did Olivia Wilde have a crush on you?
I think so. I do. I cannot tell a lie.
[Leaning closer] Did Olivia Wilde have a crush on you?
I don't know! I don't know! I'm sorry. I cannot tell. I lie.
Ben Dolnick is the author of "At the Bottom of Everything," a novel to be published in September by Penguin Random House.
E-mail submissions for Lives to lives@nytimes.com. Because of the volume of e-mail, the magazine cannot respond to every submission.
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