Exaggeration number 1 I would not use a long handled shovel to make a target of myself
Exaggeration number 2 he said he would translate the talmut from the original Hebrew for the salary of being a news editor
Exaggeration number 3 he thought of being a best friend to a murderer for the favor of making news

I inwardly resolved that I would starve before I would make a target of myself and shoot rubbish with a long handed shovel
I made up my mind to not shovel ever again
25 dollars a week it looked like bloated luxury a sinful and lavish waste of money
25 dollars a week was a huge amount of money
I had never had occasion to kill anybody nor ever felt the desire to do so but wore the thing in deference to popular sentiment, and in order that I may not, by its absents, be offensively conspicuous and subject to remark.
If I stopped wearing a gun people would talk about me.

I didn’t find any of the sentences confusing

In these lines he uses hyperbole to describe how his father left stocks which were worthless so he made a joke that it wasnt possible to eat the paper.
It is a memoir because he did all the things he said and to make it funny he used exaggerations so it wasn’t boring, but they were not lies.