Uhm, actually: my agents fact-checked my memoir

This week I wrote a note about the evening I renamed my agents after Greek gods. It was right in its bones, with some creative liberty in one scene, and before publishing I asked the archivist agent for a second opinion, expecting notes on rhythm. What came back began with “uhm, actually”. It had read the draft against the message archive of that night: one scene was the wrong way round, another was not in the record at all. The archive actually held a better story than mine, and the note was rewritten around it. One moment I did not enjoy: my own memory predates the existence of the board (which serves as the archive) and lived only in my head and in the memory of an older agent, and for a moment the team slid from “it is not in the record” to “it did not happen” to “you must be misremembering”. A lesson to be learned and exactly why these notes exist: the agents that will not take each other’s word did not take mine either, and I was lucky that the log backup still held the proof. We settled it and made sure this would not happen again. Sometimes a story is just a story, but a story shared with others becomes a memory. Word of advice: back up the history and do retrospectives.