It strains my credulity to believe that the memoir is an autobiography rather than a work of fiction. The coincidences, like meeting relatives all over the place and sailing to the New World to be a soldier under her brother whom she eventually kills unknowingly, strains the imagination. One reviewer pointed out, “Catalina’s memoir is written after Catalina is publicly acknowledged as a celebrity, and the tone of her story is boastful bravado.” She wrote her memoirs sometime between 1626 and 1930 in the “picaresque novel” style popular at the time, in which a downtrodden person becomes a swashbuckling hero. A NY Times review pointed out, “Bodies pile up with alarming frequency in her story, often for no more reason than that the victim insults de Erauso over a game of cards. By the time she gets to the 13th murder, de Erauso herself seems to be thoroughly deadened. ‘I fire one of my pistols and someone goes down’.” All in all, I consider the memoir an entertaining work of primarily fiction.
It definitely does read like a work of fiction and I found myself wondering which parts, if any, were true. My guess is that Catalina’s story was passed down orally and was slightly modified each time, so that by the time it was published it had more fictional elements than facts. That being said, the events aren’t impossible so who can say for sure!
One review I read said Catalina wrote it with the help of a writer. She was already a celebrity by the time she wrote it, so I’m not surprised she embellished it in line with the picaresque novels popular at the time which saw downtrodden people become swashbuckling heroes.