The Hill News

President Obama told the author of a new book about his life that he took editorial license in describing an ex-girlfriend in his autobiography, making her a composite sketch of other people also in his life.

The introduction of Obama's best-selling autobiography, Dreams From My Father, notes that some of the characters are composites, and that the names of some characters have been changed to protect their privacy.

That Obama's girlfriend in the book is a composite is made clear in Barack Obama: The Story, by David Maraniss, which includes diary entries and correspondence between the president, then in his early 20s, and two ex-girlfriends. 

Vanity Fair magazine published an excerpt from the book on Wednesday, and Maraniss confronted the president in an interview about how one of the girls, Genevieve Cook, doesn’t recall some of the events attributed to her from Obama’s 1995 autobiography.

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