Not much to add to what folks have shared above except to say that I have done pretty much this exact thing – 100% memoir, with some liberties taken to condense action and clean up exposition but otherwise played completely straight, and with some fairly depressing subject matter to boot (though there are a fair number of jokes along the way) – and despite my trepidation about how folks would receive it, and leaning hard into being as specific as possible, I got pretty much uniformly positive feedback (well, with the exception of one intentionally-frustrating bit of gameplay frustrating people, but I walked right into that one) and lots of folks saying it resonated with them.
Here’s the author’s notes – they’re very spoilery and I think the game does work better without knowing exactly where it’s headed, so I’d of course recommend playing it first (it’s a parser game, but it only takes about an hour and it doesn’t have any real puzzles, modulo that one intentionally-frustrating bit that you can just skip by WAITing a bunch of times in a row, with no impact whatsoever).
EDIT: ninja’d by Sophia!