Some posters appear to think LM is pretending to have been a voracious childhood reader for the purposes of selling a book, when in fact she’s skimmed the Spark Notes guide to children’s writing, and her error about which visit Lucy met Aslan on is a ‘Gotcha!’ which proves she has not only not read TLTWATW, but probably hasn’t read anything much, ever.
I mean, I don’t get it either.
But I’m always interested in my own mistakes and misrememberings, and strange automatic pilot moments. I once, in an essay for a major peer-reviewed journal got past two editors, the main editor and a copy-editor with a reference to ‘James Joyce’s highly sexual letters to Lucia’ (Lucia was Joyce’s daughter — the letters were written to his partner/wife Nora!) I knew this perfectly well, but not only did I write it and reread and revise it multiple times without registering the mistake, so did two well-known Joyce scholars, clearly equally on automatic pilot. I noticed it myself, in horror, at final proof stage.
And realised later on that I had a copy of a book about Lucia Joyce on my desk beside my PC, so probably jist absorbed it from there.
But an essay in a peer-reviewed journal almost went to press, incredibly, with the completely baseless claim that Joyce sent sex letters to his daughter.