"The Glass Menagerie" Tennessee Williams

In the first scene, the author says: "This is memory and is therefore nonrealistic." She is referring to Tom's memory, because he is narrating the story. A memory may be nonrealistic because it is how this person recounts a situation, and so we get a biased telling of the story from Tom's point of view. It doesn't make sense that he can tell of conversations between people that he wasn't present for. For example, he tells of the conversation between Jim and Laura after dinner with great detail. I just don't understand how he would know what they discussed when he was in the kitchen with his mother doing the dishes. If the story was told in the point of view of the mother or the sister then we might get a completely different recollection. At the very beginning of Scene 1, Tom says: "I give you the truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion." I think he is saying that, although it may seem unrealistic, this is how it happened in his eyes.