From Ann Patchett’s afterward to Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face (Houghton Mifflin, 1994), 231-2:
“It’s amazing how you remember everything so clearly,” a woman said, her head wrapped in a bright scarf. “All those conversations, details. Were you ever worried that you might get something wrong?”
“I didn’t remember it,” Lucy said pointedly. “I wrote it. I’m a writer.”
…By telling us that the sentences spoken in the book were not necessarily verbatim, Lucy claimed complete ownership of her history. It was her world and she would present it the way she wanted to. Her memory and desire were indeed the facts. She taught me something while I sat in the audience that night about the nature of writing and the nature of truth. In the right hands, a memoir is the flecks of gold panned out of a great, muddy river. A memoir is those flecks melted down into a shapeable liquid that can then be molded and hammered into a single bright band to be worn on a finger, something you could point to and say, “This? Oh, this is my life.” Everyone has a muddy river, but very few have the vision, patience, and talent to turn it into something so beautiful. This is why the writer matters, so that we can not only learn from her experience but find a way to shape our own. I’m not talking about shaping every life into a work of art, I’m talking about making our life into something we can understand, a portable object that contains the weight and power of an entire terrain.”

One of my students, Brett Dickerson, has an eloquent answer to this question:
“It’s the same type of storytelling we use everyday. When my wife asks how my day was, when Dad tells me about the livestock sale, or when my brother tells me whey he drank so much last weekend, it’s all creative nonfiction.”

“Faction” is Wole Soyinka’s word. It’s also been described as literary journalism, personal essay, impersonal essay, reportage, autobiography, memoir, lyric essay, meditation… <a href= “http://www.billroorbach.com”>Bill Roorbach</a> (in the wonderful Writing Life Stories) describes all these terms and others as fitting under the umbrella of the term “creative nonfiction,” which I also like.