The underlying story is somewhat interesting. The author went through life with a lot of unnecessary guilt and suffering because he was carrying around a false narrative, and it is true that false narratives happen. But the larger conclusion he tries to draw from it seems really problematic:
>History is not true. You can change history. The actual factual events are such a small part of the story. Everything else is interpretation.
But this is NOT the moral of the story in my view. The moral is that one can have an erroneous belief about what happened, and THAT can cause a lot of problems. The author even experienced feeling better when he learned what ACTUALLY happened, not when he decided on a new interpretation of events. Because his original belief about the event was NOT an interpretation of events, it was an erroneous belief about what the events were.
And in fact, in the anecdote, learning the "factual events" was everything.
In general, I struggle with the idea that calling something that's just factually wrong "an interpretation". That seems to stretch the word "interpretation" to the point where it stops being useful. If I am convinced that Napoleon was, in fact, a black man, do we really want to call that an "interpretation of events". What events am I interpreting? None, I would argue. I'm just making things up. Just like someone made up that the woman in the story broke her spine. It just never happened. It's not an interpretation of anything.