I grew up in Lincolnshire, the large and broadly ignored county of the east Midlands. To say exactly whereabouts in Lincolnshire is immediately to get into the pesky business of what makes a smooth story as opposed to what is awkwardly true. I can usually get away with saying “a village called Woodhall Spa in Lincolnshire”. And for people who aren’t exactly sure where Lincolnshire might be, that’s usually more than enough detail.

But let’s delve into the stubborn complications. Until I was five, I lived with my parents and two older brothers in Woodhall Spa. I got the impression that it was one of the “nicer” villages in the area: beech-lined avenues, a golf club, a Conservative Club, a series of pubs with horse-brassy fireplaces and hotels with mock-Tudor facades. Daily Mail territory and then some. That was my dad’s newspaper of choice although I doubt he had much time to read it. He was a woodsman on the local estate: chain-sawing trees, selling the logs and stakes. Tough and dangerous work after which he would have a drink and then come home to three boys under 12 years old. The son of a disciplinarian father himself … what was going to happen?

So when I was five, my parents divorced and my mother, brothers and I moved to Coningsby, another village of about the same size but with – it felt to me – a different character. Still homogeneously white, still as socially conservative as the rest of Lincs in the 1980s, but somehow less “nice”. Fewer trees, more Daily Mirror, more vulnerability to the idea of poverty as a virtue than the equally ridiculous notion of poverty as a character flaw. What’s the word I’m looking for? Poorer. Coningsby seemed down on its luck and full of people that claimed it was more “real” than Woodhall.

When I was 17 my mum died and I moved back to Woodhall to live with my dad; to finish and then retake my A-levels. And that’s where I came back to stay during breaks from Cambridge and, later, family visits from London. So Woodhall was my first and last Lincolnshire home. But to say “that’s where I come from” would be to glide over the years from five to 17 that actually formed me, if you’ll excuse the pomposity of my “forming”.

My task in How Not to Be a Boy was to turn a life into a story; to make the truth of my memory live on the page. Places are painted with broad strokes, people are reduced to characters (including me) and memory meets art. And, frankly, art needs to show memory who’s boss if anyone is going to read it.

There are no made up events in the book, but plenty of elisions and subtractions. Respect to the truth is due, and given, to the people who were there. I come from Lincolnshire. It’s true. But it’s also a story.

• How Not to Be a Boy by Robert Webb (Canongate, £8.99). To order a copy for £7.49, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.

• This article was amended on 16 May 2018. An image was captioned as showing Lincolnshire’s Woodhall Spa golf course. The picture, however, was of Wallasey golf club on the Wirral.