A Moveable Feast

A Moveable Feast is a memoir of Hemingway’s time in Paris, but to categorize the memoir as purely nonfiction would be incorrect. Hemingway uses the Preface as an opportunity to vocalize his understanding of the relation between fact and fiction. In so doing, he asserts a new kind of memoir, one that understands the limitations of subjective perception and memory and that acknowledges its place within competing accounts. He opens the novel with a preliminary note to the reader; “For reasons sufficient to the writer, many places, people, observations and impressions have been left out of this book. Some were secrets and some were known by everyone and everyone has written about them and will doubtless write more” (3). Already, Hemingway is alerting the reader that this is a different kind of memoir, one that acknowledges its restrictions. He continues by listing a series of events that are omitted, such as the Stade Anastasie, “the great twenty-round fights at the Cirque d’Hiver,” or their voyages to the Black Forest. Hemingway comments that the memoir would be “fine if all these were in this book but we will have to do without them for now” (3).