I have a problem with books in that I read a lot of them and will forgo sleep to keep turning the pages of a good one. And I invariably pick good books. For the last week or so, I’ve been plowing through the trilogy on which the PBS series Call the Midwife is based. Written by Jennifer Worth some 50 years after she stopped working with a group of nuns as a nurse among the poor in the slums of the East End of London, the books are finely written. If she didn’t have a ghost writer or endure heavy editing, Worth was not only a fine nurse (and a musician later in life), but had a great gift for story telling.

The first book, Call the Midwife: A True Story of the East End in the 1950s, is almost a twin of the television series. It was gratifying that there wasn’t a lot of difference between book and film (is there anything worse than reading a book and finding the film version wanting? Except maybe seeing the film version and finding the books completely different?). I know that Hollywood-types take liberties with the print version in the name of visuals or what some guy holding the wallet thinks will sell better. That doesn’t seem to have happened. A couple characters from the books didn’t make it into the first or second series, and there are few stories from the series that aren’t in the books at all.

The tone of the writing is nostalgic, and I kept thinking of the scalloped edges of black and white pictures from the time. It made me wish there was some illustration in the books. Worth used pseudonyms for characters and made up a name for the convent out of which she worked. Obviously privacy was important to her — of her patients and her peers. But still: I’m sure there must have been pictures available of Worth herself in her Poplar surroundings, or at the very least that showed us the post-World War II landscape in which she worked.

Volume 2, Shadows of the Workhouse tells the stories of patients who had been impacted by life in the workhouse at the turn of the 20th century. The stories are invariably sad and angry-making. You want to rant and rage against a system that to our modern sensibilities is nothing but cruel. But Worth reminds us in the body of the book as well as in the appendix which explains the workhouse system, that this was something awful that developed out of noble ideas of helping people who had no other assistance. It was, she says, the beginning of the modern welfare state. One of Worth’s strengths as a writer is that she always brings us back to the point of view of the characters and the time in which they lived. There was no such thing as women’s lib or birth control or abortion. Domestic violence was rife and expected by both women and children. That a group of women carved out a career for themselves and were living lives independent of fathers or husbands is something utterly amazing to the Jenny of the stories, and the author lets that amazement shine through.

The final book in the trilogy is Farewell to the East End which tells some of the best stories. How Chummy fell in love and married, as well as the amazing story of a man who married identical twins (and strange ones at that), are included here. There is information that goes beyond what I watched on TV, which is gratifying. But as I finished the books I was sad that one of my favorite story lines, the tale of Sister Bernadette falling in love with the doctor, wasn’t in the books. I’m guessing that means it wasn’t true and was added for dramatic value. Other missing stories in the books that showed up in the series covered issues like date rape, abortion, and birth control. The series was made after the author died in 2011, and I’m guessing she would have included such material in her books if it had, indeed, happened.

One thing irked me throughout the books: how could she know what some characters said and did in her absence? There has been a lot of discussion in the last few years about how true a memoir needs to be — Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea, A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, and even David Sedaris‘ essays have come under fire for doing everything from mucking with time and creating composite characters, to outright lying. I think there has to be an assumption of truth if you call something memoir. I have recommended the Worth  books to others — I sent my mom copies because she loved the show and will enjoy the books, too. And that wouldn’t change if they were published as fiction based on a true story. Given the popularity of the trilogy — in the top 100 on Amazon.com — and the wild audience response to the series (a third  set of eight shows and a Christmas special was just ordered, and individual episodes outperformed Downton Abbey), I’m guessing others wouldn’t mind, either,  if it was noted that not everything written in the books was precisely true.

As I write my own story I struggle with issues of memory and how what I recall may differ from others’ experience. But I promise you this: If I publish a book called memoir, it will be truth — my truth and how I remember what happened. It won’t be be fictionalized. If I have to do that, well, I’ll publish it as fiction. And that’s what Jennifer Worth should have done, too.