Anyhow, I was crestfallen at age six to discover that I was adopted. To cover up the shame, I told my friends I was a Romanov who escaped from the massacre of the czar and czarina and the whole Russian royal family in that basement in 1918, then stowed away on a freighter in the Crimea and was taken in by a kindly customs officer and his wife when we docked in Halifax. That backfired, because my little friends kept coming at me with penknives to see if I was a hemophiliac.

My editor drew a circle around that last statement and wrote, “Prove it!” Another bluff called. Of course I am not a hemophiliac, a Romanov, an orphan, etc., etc.

One reason for writing this memoir was to clear the air of all the lies I’ve spewed over the years and at last get on an honest footing in life. Thus far, I’ve made a royal mess of it. But I beg the reader to stick with me. I’m also hoping to give the layperson some insight into this condition and its terrible costs. My editor says I might even be contributing to the clinical literature about my condition.

So let’s really level this time: I was born in a boxcar in the rail yards outside Brandon, Manitoba, during the depths of the Great Depression. My father, a famous violinist, lost his bowing arm in a threshing machine accident in Saskatchewan while helping his parents bring in the summer crop in ‘32 or ‘33, and he criss-crossed the country afterward looking for work. I re-member the night in a hobo camp when he traded his Strad for a can of Sterno.

With his fingers warm and nimble, inspiration struck, and he was soon doing very well for himself selling apples 5¢ signs to the jobless. We moved to the Rosedale neighbourhood of Toronto, where I was chauffeured to class every morning in a huge Pierce-Arrow, even though the school was next door.

I’m driving myself crazy, not to mention you the reader, with these whoppers. Why should you believe anything I say? But bear with me. I’m trying as hard as I can to finally break down the mental machinery that reroutes me from the truth before I catch myself. The psychologists say the pattern can be broken. Trying is my only hope for a decent life.

Calm down, I tell myself. As I sit here in my tiny room in a fleabag hotel in Fort Nelson, BC, where I’ve come in a desperate last effort to rend the tissue of lies and drive that half-buried thing called the truth out of the depths and into the light of day, I can dimly recall my-self as a seven-year-old eavesdropping on my parents whispering to somebody at the back door of our house in Charlottetown, and the realization slowly dawning on me that I was being traded for a croquet set. A used croquet set.

Sitting on the front porch that night, wondering where to go while listening to the muffled click of wood-en balls and my parents’ cries in triumph and curses in defeat, I resolved to become an aviator.

Damn it to hell!

I’ve thought about this a lot, and the odd thing is that we congenital liars aren’t even seeking an advantage by manufacturing our stupid falsehoods. Most of the time, we know the people we’re lying to know they’re being lied to. Who’d believe that story about being traded for a used croquet set, for God’s sake? Maybe it’s some perversion of the tale-telling instinct that in a normal, healthy person would create great works of literature or million-dollar screenplays. Or maybe not — I’ve conspicuously failed with every novel and script I’ve ever written.