  John Irving writes that a fiction writer's memory is an "especially imperfect provider of detail; we can always imagine a better detail than we can remember. " The most truthful detail, he contends, is what could have happened, what should have happened.
Irving traces the beginning of his own writing career to a time when he and his friends mercilessly taunted the mentally retarded man who collected garbage on Front Street in his stately New Hampshire neighborhood, much to the dismay of John's prim and proper grandmother. "Oink, oink," they would call as "Piggy" Sneed tossed the trash into the back of his rickety pickup, which was filled with pigs. Real pigs. Rumor had it that Piggy slept with the pigs in their pigpen. He never spoke but was said to snort and oink, just like his pigs. When the local fire department's alarm sounded and a truck was dispatched to Piggy Sneed's pig farm, John, the youngest volunteer, could not believe it. The men joked on the way to the fire that Piggy would roast with his pigs because he was too stupid to escape. Hanging from the side of the truck and feeling the heat of the fire on his face as they approached Piggy's farm, John began to wonder who Piggy really was. And, he began to feel guilty about tormenting the man who'd never done anything to him. Maybe he's not really retarded, John reasoned.
Maybe he's saving money from the sale of his pigs to move to Florida, John suggested to the other firefighters. They just looked at him in disbelief. Or, John imagined, Piggy is from Europe or somewhere else and he doesn't speak English, that's why he never talks. But as the flames grew hotter and engulfed the entire pigpen, it became apparent that Piggy could not possibly have survived, were he with his pigs that night as he usually was.
Not until they pulled Piggy's burned and blackened body from the fire did John relent. (Maybe he had family in Florida and was planning to join them there). For Irving, writing became an endless journey of Trying to Save Piggy Sneed , the title of his 1996 memoir. His stories and books are his attempts to rewrite history, to run back into that fire and pull Piggy out alive -- or to prevent the fire from starting in the first place.
A lifelong habit of writing stories has skewed my own sense of recall and reality. As a small child, I escaped my own fears by writing stories of triumph and perserverence and creating characters with courage and conviction. Before long, what really happened took second chair to what should have, what could have happened. These days, as my beautiful friend Lynn fights for her own life and I watch, as helpless as John and the other men dangling from the sides of that fire truck, I am again grateful for the ability to write, rather than think, my way through things.
The real truth is that Lynn will be well, healed, cancer-free. What should be for her is health, peace, love and laughter. What could be for her is a world of endless possibilities. Lynn is the most loving, giving and gentle soul I've ever encountered. My brain does not even know how to begin thinking about what is; it is filled with stories of what should be, what could be.
As I sat talking with Lynn today after Day 2 of her week-long treatments, I took off my shoe and pointed to my foot. I'd absent-mindedly banged it on the desk while sitting at the computer writing. "Look," I said. "I've got a bruise. " The absurdity of my little bruise hit us simultaneously. There she sat, Band-Aids on both arms, exhausted and somewhat disoriented from the rigors of a quintuple dose of god-knows-what, gearing up for a mystery procedure on her head during Day 3. There I sat with a slightly bluish spot on my foot. We both burst out laughing. "Aw," she said. "You've got an owie. " Yes, I do, I thought. And you're going to be fine. You're going to be well. You're going to live. Because if you weren't, I sure as hell would not be sitting here talking about my bruise. 
