Are Memories really Reliable or just Remembered Lies?

Christopher Nolan, the director of this film Memento, did a great job of portraying the main character Leonard's mental condition on screen. Before the accident of both his wife and himself being attacked, he was normal, happily married and worked as an insurance investigator. He had the good life and things were going well until everything took a bad turn. He lost his memory, couldn't make new memories and became obsessed with finding his wife's killer. How his damaged brain is shown on film is confusing, dark, depressing and unbelievable. I feel if this exact movie was a book of some sort that it would not work out on paper because there would be too much going on and everything will be out of order, unappealing its readers. 

Which brings me to Leitch's twelve fallacies in our book,  Film & Literature. There were a couple I agreed with based on this movie.  Number three: Literary text are verbal, films visual and number five: Novels deal in concepts, films in percept. Number three supports my view on Memento working better as a movie than an novel because of the complexity.  Leitch wrote, "Instead of saying that literary texts are verbal and movies aren't, it would be more accurate to say that movie depend on prescribed, unalterable visual and verbal performances in a way literary texts don't." I completely agree with this because it's exactly what novels and films do, especially this movie. Memento was adapted from a short story and it was confusing just like the movie but with it being on screen, it's was a little easier to comprehend  than it is on paper.  Number five kind of go in hand with number three. "Fallacies enter only when the conceptual is defined in contradistinction to the perceptual, as an exclusive property of verbal texts and the pleasures movies offer their audience are defined in terms that privilege the perceptual." 

That quote can be translated with another quote, "The differences between percept and concept may well be more properly a function of rereading, and of a specifically analytical kind of rereading, than of a difference between movies, which are commonly assumed against mounting evidence to be watched to be watched only once, and novels, which are assumed to be endlessly re-readable, with each rereading converting more percepts to concepts." Meaning people would rather read the same book over and over again even though they know what's going to happen and think of new concepts of the plot. While those same people will only watch a movie once because they can't really make new percepts to the concepts because they have already been created. I understand and agree with him because books are free to interpret whatever you want, while films already have interpreted it and you don't agree with their choices of characters, scene set-up or even costumes. I think  that this movie defeats that because both the short story and film is confusing and hard to interpret so I think the audience was not too disappoint with that but probably more disappointed with the out of order set-up and trying to piece everything together.

After rethinking this movie, I came up with Leonard's wife surviving the attack and his damage mind making him this crazy, obsessed person trying to get justice for his 'dead' wife. Since the cops couldn't find them, he took it as his job to find them and kill them. His wife got tired of trying to make him remember her and leaves him. So he thought she was dead and continued to try to avenge her. I don't know if any of this is true but its my theory of perception.