Life is better, somehow, if it’s a story. Of course there are some who don’t believe in stories and want only facts. But draw a line, almost any line, between the facts, and what you get is a story. Stories are better than facts because they are, in a profound sense, more true; they ring in our hearts and allow us to feel that there might be, after all, a reason for all this (whatever this is) and that there is a possibility of our being understood, even by an author who died long before we walked the earth. Thus the French writer Grégoire Bouillier, near the end of “The Mystery Guest,” his sad, funny and vivid new memoir, quotes the French critic Michel Leiris on the view that “literary activity, in its specific aspect as a mental discipline, cannot have any other justification than to illuminate certain matters for oneself at the same time as one makes them communicable to others, and that one of the highest goals … is to restore by means of words certain intense states, concretely experienced and become significant, to be thus put into words.”…

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