Interested in hearing about a mother who married seven times, a son who met his father in a homeless shelter, or a girl whose formative years were spent drinking? Unconventional lives make interesting reading. Authors Mary Karr, Nick Flynn, and Koren Zailckas gathered Monday at Barnes & Noble Lincoln Square to talk about their lives and discuss truth, lies, and the art of the memoir. The event marked the 10th anniversary since the publication of Ms. Karr’s book, “The Liars’ Club” (Penguin), which helped spawn the memoir’s contemporary popularity.

Ms. Karr opened by telling an anecdote from her childhood about “the tile guy redoing their kitchen,” who pried loose a tile with a round hole. “Now Miss Karr,” he had told her mother, “that looks like a bullet hole.” Her sister had inquired, “Isn’t that where you shot at Daddy?” “No,” her mother had replied nonchalantly, “That’s where I shot at Larry. Over there is where I shot at Daddy. “This, Ms. Karr told the audience, explains why she choose to write “The Liars’ Club” as a memoir rather than fiction: “When you’re given characters like these, why make things up?”

In the book Ms. Karr explained her initial concern over her mother’s reaction to her writing a memoir. But her mother said, “Hell, get it off your chest … If I gave a damn what anybody thought, I’d have been baking cookies and going to PTA.” Ms. Karr discussed aspects of the memoir. They necessarily involve shaping the past “the moment you decide to write about this event and not that one.”

Mr. Flynn, author of “Another Bulls- Night in Suck City” (W.W. Norton), said he found Ms. Karr’s book to be a foundational text. He likewise contrasted memoirs with sound bites, and said he has been asked what it felt like the moment his father walked into the homeless shelter. It could not be summed up in a sound bite: There was no single moment when his father became homeless, and there is no one emotion he could name.

Ms. Karr distinguished two customary models of memory – “both of which are wrong.” The first is the Freudian unconscious, a “file drawer in your head you could access. “The other is the computer drive. “History – even objective history – is not downloaded,” Ms. Karr said.

“My obligation, which feels to me like a moral obligation, is not to make stuff up.” Nevertheless, she said, memory leaks into imagination all the time. Mr. Flynn recited John Berryman’s line that a poet’s job was not to play fast and loose with the facts of this world. Berryman has poems with sheep talking, Mr. Flynn reminded the audience. The reality, however, was in “what sheep would say,” he added, to audience laughter.

“Memory is strange,” Mr. Flynn continued, “the more you look at it.” He said he grows tired of creating a single persona: “We wake up a little different every day.” Like Ms. Karr, he does not make things up, but does use artistic techniques to portray a psychological breakdown in his book. In his case, it is a surrealist play with quotations from “King Lear.” He said he wanted the reader to “have an experience rather than being told what I was feeling.”

He said one result of writing a memoir is that “your family will tell you things didn’t happen that way at all.” He gave the example of describing himself as having Irish ancestry; his brother refers to his English ancestry. This is “peculiarly American: You can choose who you are.”

Ms. Zailckas, author of “Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood” (Viking), said a journalist once asked her, “Come on, surely the organizing principle of your life wasn’t alcohol?” Of course not, she said, “I never said it was the organizing principle in my life. It was the organizing principle behind my memoir. Life has no organizing principle. It’s a mess.” She said that memoirs naturally favor big moments, and her big moments from 14 to 22 involved alcohol.

An audience member asked whether a memoirist feels the need to protect other people’s privacy. Ms. Karr said that in her book, she gave braces to the boy who sexually assaulted her in her youth. Mr. Flynn said a lawyer from the publisher quizzed him about the drug addicts he wrote about. He said he changed all the names of homeless people, but refused to change the name of the city where the events occurred.

Another audience member inquired whether the authors consulted diaries to assist their writing. Ms. Zailckas said she kept a journal, but it contained everything except her drinking. Mr. Flynn said he wrote his book first and then examined records such as the logbook at the homeless shelter. Ms. Karr said research was simply a way of delaying actual writing and putting off the hard choices memoir writing entails.

“If you’re writing a memoir to settle a score,” she concluded, it probably won’t produce a good literary result. Instead, “Buy a gun.”

* * *

PRESENTED AT PIERRE Chairman and CEO of Fox News, Roger Ailes, was guest of honor Thursday night at the Jewish Community Relations Council’s gala. In a video tribute to Mr. Ailes, President Clinton said humorously, “Yes, it’s me, and the end must be near if I’m talking on behalf of Roger Ailes.” Mr. Clinton went on to praise Mr. Ailes and thank the former adviser to presidential campaigns for staying out of the 1992 elections. Henry Kissinger introduced Mr. Ailes.

Speaking of the former secretary of state in his acceptance remarks, Mr. Ailes quipped that Mr. Kissinger had reached such a level of fame that “when you bore people, they think it’s their fault.”