Madame Memory - a great and subtle dissembler

In John Banville's "Ancient Light" the protagonist scenes switch back and forth between him as an old man with an opportunity to resume his acting career and him as a fifteen year old boy in an affair with a woman old enough to be his mother.  He, very early in the novel, sets out what will be the central theme for the narrative as follows.

"Images from the far past crowd in my head and half the time I cannot tell whether they are memories or inventions.  Not that there is much difference between the two, if indeed there is any difference at all.  Some say that without realising it we make it all up as we go along, embroidering and embellishing, and I am inclined to credit it, for Madame Memory is a great and subtle dissembler (12)." 

A little later in the novel he adds an emerging perspective to the theme, "I was not accustomed yet to the chasm that yawns between the doing of a thing and the recollection of what was done (85)."

Near the end of the novel the protagonist after some investigative work meets a Nun who, as it happens, is the daughter of the woman he had the affair with.  She, the daughter, is the person who walked in on them as they were in one of their encounters making love. The memories of the protagonist seem to have been affected by the guilt and shame he felt when they were caught, which in turn led to false assumptions about other characters reactions and actions after the affair was exposed.  The nun-daughter's memories seem clear-headed, descriptive and reliable now and there is no way to know how much of it has been invented.  Nonetheless, the protagonist accepts her account of the situation as accurate, which brings about resolution to each character's remembrance of what happened oh so many years ago.