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Daniel Torday’s new novel, _The Last Flight of Poxl West_, is about how memoir and fiction can blur — and how hard it can be to convey truth. “It’s very, very difficult to put anything down

in writing,” Torday tells _Fresh Air_‘s Terry Gross. “And it’s especially [difficult] to put it down about one’s self in a way that is exactly 100 percent accurate, especially when it’s

about a trauma, especially when we’re trying to remember a thing that happened and remember it as accurately as possible. So my attempt with this novel was to say, ‘How can I create a

fiction that will allow two separate narratives to take that on as thoroughly and as searchingly as possible?’” _The Last Flight of Poxl West_ takes place in 1986 and is narrated by a

15-year-old whose surrogate uncle is publishing a memoir about his experiences in World War II, when he was a Jewish refugee from Czechoslovakia. In the memoir, the uncle describes how he

managed to get to England, enlist in the Royal Air Force and fly key bombing missions over Germany. The book becomes a best-seller, but the uncle — a hero in the narrator’s eyes — is later

unmasked as having fabricated parts of his story. READ THIS STORY FOR FREE To continue reading, sign up for our newsletters and get unlimited access to WABE.org