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Like Kaufman I know a lie when I hear it and that facts are the commonest tool of the habitual liar.  When I hear an overemphasis on facts I start listening for the hidden lie.  I am in sympathy with most of her concerns.  On the first reading I heard her quandry and lack of resolution.  The comments of the students gave me a different picture, so I went back to her.  The second time every sentence seemed written especially to me.  I have many questions about my own writing now.  Like Kaufman, no resolution.  Literature is very rigid: How do I tell a story that's uncommon in any way without the reader fitting it into one of the common patterns?  If you show an unpleasant family, the story becomes about getting away.  Many of us have unpleasant families but loved them and still love them.  No reader hears that.  I grew up in a poor, barren countryside.  It was so beautiful in my eyes that Peter Rabbit in those pretty drawings fit right in.  I remember the tamarinds in bloom along the edge of the dry river bed and the exquisite golden color inside the playhouses we made of tumbleweeds, for example.  Unless I write a sopppy, sentimental story, no one can see the beauty in that barren land.  If I tell a true story ---  the spirits of the people are asharsh as the countryside ---  the reader is deaf to any beauty in the relationships.  Maybe I simply don't write well enough.  But where are the models then?  Who has been able to break out of those ruts?  Some people have tried.  Doris Lessing, for one.  She says she failed.  Kaufman points out pitfalls I had not seen.  How am I to write about a poor, uneducated, hard-working woman in Central America?  If her life is beautiful (as many of them are), does my story become propaganda for the status quo?  If her life is tragic, I can already guess it would be the pretext for some do-gooders in the U.S. to export to Central America life styles that won't work here any better than they have worked in the United States.  Lots of questions.  Maybe I will fail, too.  But then maybe I won't. 

I'm grateful to you all for your posted comments.