She started out writing a novel, but after pages and pages she discovers she has written more of a memoir. Perhaps it would be easiest just to change course, but first she must contact some classmates she’s lost touch with to verify the accuracy of her memories. Then it turns out that many of her old classmates aren’t so certain about the past, either, and the ones that claim to be certain seem rather suspect. As the protagonist of Lee Chia-Ying’s A Perfect Day to Put Your Head in the Oven vacillates between memory, self-examination, and ruminations on the act of creation, the outrageous and cunningly constructed leaps between reality and fiction will have readers howling. When the facts about the past are no longer reliable, could it be that fiction is the one link to reality that remains?