By J. M. Coetzee, from The Good Story, out last month from Viking. The book collects a series of exchanges between Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz, a psychotherapist, on the correspondences between fiction and psychotherapy.

Let me ask a question that has nagged at me for some time. Are all autobiographies, all life narratives, not fictions, at least in the sense that they are constructions?

“When I was eight my father hit me with a tennis racket,” says a subject. “Not true,” says his father. “I was swinging the racket and accidentally hit him.” Is the boy’s or the father’s memory…