Narrative Truths, and Lies
There is a narrative truth in life that seems quite removed from logic, science, and empirical demonstration. It is the truth of a “good story.”
-DON MCADAMS
Sometimes life isn’t as neat as the narratives we build.
-KATHERINE RAMSLAND
After resigning as secretary of labor to join the Brandeis University faculty, Robert Reich wrote a memoir called Locked in the Cabinet. Reviews of Reich’s lively look back at his four years in Bill Clinton’s cabinet were generally positive. Reviewers especially liked the many vigorous exchanges Reich reported in which he went mano a mano, barb to barb with Republican antagonists, usually coming out ahead. A few weeks after this book was published, an enterprising Slate reporter named Jonathan Rauch examined some of its content more closely. By comparing actual transcripts and videotapes of public events with the way Reich described them, Rauch determined that many of his accounts were at best embellished, at worst cut from whole cloth. C-Span videotape showed that a congressional hearing Reich depicted as raucous was in fact sedate. It included none of the vitriolic debates recalled by
the author. A tedious exchange of policy views at another taped congressional hearing had been recast by Reich as a fiery showdown between a cruel committee chair and a valiant labor secretary holding firm in the witness seat. An all-male lunch meeting that he remembered as filled with calumny and cigar smoke turned out to be a low-key breakfast in a no-smoking room with lots of women present. Other reporters found apocrypha of their own in Reich’s memoir. The general conclusion was that his memoir had more to do with mythmaking than reality. Robert Reich had cooked his book.
The author had no choice but to admit that there were frequent gaps between what had actually happened and the way he portrayed it. His explanation? He was not dishonest, Reich insisted. Quite the contrary: “I was absolutely true to my memory.” Without admitting any wrongdoing, Reich revised the disputed material in subsequent editions. “Memory is fallible,” he explained in a foreword. What the former labor secretary did not explain was why he hadn’t checked the public record when writing his book, as reporters did after it was published. The best excuse Reich could offer was that Locked in the Cabinet was not meant to be journalism. It was a memoir. If not the truth, it was his truth.
Robert Reich was hardly alone in improving his life’s record. Far from it. What he was engaged in is increasingly common among contemporary writers of nonfiction: sweetening their material—or even making it up—for the sake of a better narrative.
So what? some ask. Lighten up, they say. To them there’s simply no issue of consequence here. Some writers feel they can be truthful only when they dispense with the need to be factual. “Absolute occurrence is irrelevant,” wrote Tim O‘Brien. “A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.” Fair enough—for fiction (which O’Brien primarily
writes). But this conviction has not limited itself to the world of fiction. Even when writing nonfiction, some believe, if readers can be engaged better with fantasy than fact, more’s the better.
John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the “nonfiction” best-seller of its era, was highly fictionalized. Berendt himself admitted this (after others pointed out his many departures from the factual record). One could argue that the author’s imaginative recounting of a crime committed in Savannah, Georgia, was merely creative license. That’s certainly how he saw it. After whistles were blown on the many liberties he took with facts, Berendt said he saw no harm in “rounding the corners to make a better narrative.” While admitting that he’d embellished some elements of his book and made up others, Berendt got a bit testy with those who questioned the propriety of calling his book nonfiction. “It was entertainment, it was show biz,” he told the New York Times. Berendt hastened to add that his book was 99 percent accurate. This was not a bad percentage, he thought. Anyway, Berendt added, “the truth that I was telling was the actual story, and I do not think that I distorted the truth by cutting these corners.”
The borders between fiction and nonfiction have grown increasingly vague. This is far better known to those who publish books than to those who buy them. I once heard a literary agent say she put novels and memoirs in the same category. Her real preference was for works of “narrative nonfiction.” When used this way, the term “narrative” refers to a vague not-quite-true, not-quite-false genre of writing. In book publishing, it’s generally accepted that works of narrative nonfiction such as Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil will include as many fictional elements as are necessary to sustain reader interest. From that perspective, larger truths
and narrative drive can best be achieved by relinquishing an outdated obsession with accuracy. This isn’t easy. “The Puritan concept lingers,” explained Tristine Rainer in Your Life as Story, a popular primer on memoir writing, “echoing in our heads, warning us to demarcate fact from fiction … . Just as there are fundamentalists who still do not accept the theory of evolution and consider it dangerous, there are many people who still insist that autobiographic writing has to be verifiable fact … [But] New Autobiography, having moved into the literary arena of poetry and fiction, is now concerned with the larger truths of myth and story, which permit, and sometimes require, imaginative reshaping.”
New Autobiography has many practitioners:
• While signing copies of Angela’s Ashes in his hometown of Limerick, Ireland, Frank McCourt was approached by a boyhood friend who wondered why McCourt wrote that he had a sister when he didn’t. “This was true,” McCourt responded. “Somehow or other I invented a sister for him who had none.”
• In his memoir Widower’s House, John Bayley featured two women—an old family friend named Margot, “dark, ample and dynamic,” and a young graduate student named Mella, “fair and slight”—who shared Bayley’s grief and bed after the death of his wife, Iris Murdoch. Bayley subsequently admitted that both women were figments of his imagination. “I had no lovers,” he told a Sunday Times reporter. “Just daydreams.”
• University of Montana faculty member Judy Blunt wrote a memoir called Breaking Clean which got rave reviews and a Whiting Award for promising new authors. Blunt’s book portrayed her early life on a ranch in Montana, tending to her husband, his father, and ranch hands. She yearned to write
and bought herself a typewriter. But, in a dramatic scene noted by many reviewers, her husband’s father—who was angry because she was late serving lunch to the hay crew—took a sledgehammer to Blunt’s typewriter and “killed it.” After this episode was mentioned in a news article, the author’s former father-in-law said it never happened. Blunt then admitted that the real story was considerably less dramatic. What was the real story? “I don’t want to go into it,” she told a reporter.
This is the post-truth credo: creative manipulation and invention of facts can take us beyond the realm of mere accuracy into one of narrative truth. Embellished information can be true in spirit—truer than truth. Edmund Morris called Dutch, his biography of Ronald Reagan with its fictional narrator and fanciful events, “an advance in biographical honesty.” The book’s publisher said Morris’s imagined episodes in the life of his subject “merely tell the truth in ways altogether new.” This is intellectually fashionable doublethink. It leads to a kind of looking-glass morality in which clunky accuracy is considered a lower grade of truthfulness than lyrical apocrypha. From this Joseph Campbellian perspective, myths and legends can portray deeper truths than mere facts. It puts a New Age gloss on the old Bolshevik conviction that information can be altered for a greater good, and that rigid notions of accuracy belong in history’s dustbin along with bustles, buttonhooks, and bourgeois notions of morality. For those not in the know, however, it means they routinely read fictionalized text that is mislabeled “nonfiction.”
Apparently this is true of writing by Vivian Gornick. Gornick’s memoir, Fierce Attachments, is considered a classic. When it was published in 1987, the New York Times called Fierce Attachments a “fine
and unflinchingly honest book.” Gornick subsequently published a well-regarded guide to writing personal narratives. That was why, when the memoirist spoke at Goucher College a decade and a half after Fierce Attachments was published, listeners were startled to hear her admit that she’d invented parts of it. Not only that, Gornick added, some articles she’d written for the Village Voice included composite characters. Gornick seemed surprised by the incredulity that greeted these admissions, not only among members of her audience but among those who read news accounts of this talk or heard it discussed by book critic Maureen Corrigan on NPR’s Fresh Air. Corrigan, who teaches literature at Georgetown University, noted how much she liked Vivian Gornick’s writing. The professor routinely assigned the author’s books to her students. That was why she’d been so startled to hear her admission of literary legerdemain. Corrigan said she still considered Gornick a fine writer, and would continue to read her books, but now with her guard up.
Gornick fired back. Memoirs were a form of literature, she said, and therefore exempt from journalistic conventions of accuracy. The problem didn’t lie with her; it lay with ill-informed readers who couldn’t grasp this fact. “Memoir writing,” Gornick lamented, “is a genre still in need of an informed readership.” The problem, in other words, lay with ignorant readers, not deceptive writers. Needless to say, Maureen Corrigan didn’t agree. As she observed, “It adds insult to injury to be told by the autobiographer in question that in accepting the conventional autobiographical contract that the writer is indeed trying to write the truth, you as the reader are a dope.”
Readers in ancient Greece had no expectation that writing of any kind would be factually accurate. Herodotus freely incorporated
legends, hearsay, and imaginative reconstructions into his histories. Thucydides’ more factual accounts of historical events included words he put in subjects’ mouths. Centuries later, Daniel Defoe’s famous “journal” of a plague year proved to a product of his imagination. Defoe, who was four years old at the time of the plague he wrote about, cobbled his book together from stories he’d heard, family lore, extensive reading, and inventive re-creation.
When reading the works of such protohistorians, readers took for granted that much was a product of the writer’s imagination. Boundaries between fiction and nonfiction were vague to nonexistent. More recently, however, a clear distinction has been made between texts that are considered factually accurate and ones that aren’t. When reading material labeled nonfiction, contemporary readers assume that it’s factual insofar as the author could ascertain facts. Journalists in particular consider this a hard-won victory over the flamboyant subjectivity of newspapers in the past. Others mourn the development. Bruce Chatwin, whose travel books (In Patagonia, The Songlines) were quite imaginative, thought the distinction between fiction and nonfiction was “extremely arbitrary, and invented by publishers.” Hunter Thompson concurred. “‘Fiction’ and ‘nonfiction’ are nineteenth-century terms,” said the gonzo journalist.
Thompson was part of a new school (actually a reversion to an old school) called “New Journalism.” In theory, New Journalists such as him combined novelistic writing techniques with rigorous reporting to produce vivid works of nonfiction. Their debt to novel writing presumably was limited to plot devices such as scene setting, character development, and foreshadowing. As we were to discover, there was far more to the story.
The modern precedent for this approach can be found among midcentury New Yorker journalists such as Joseph Mitchell, Lillian
Ross, A. J. Leibling, and John Hersey, who wrote with fictionlike flair. Because their employer had such an impeccable reputation for verifying facts, this new writing method was taken as just that: a method, a style, not a challenge to veracity itself.
The New Yorker’s four-part excerpt of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood in 1965 was a watershed event in the history of so-called literary journalism. At the time it was serialized, then published as a book, Capote’s depiction of a gruesome Kansas murder and its aftermath was lionized for combining novelistic panache with meticulous reporting. For decades to come, In Cold Blood set the standard for well-reported works of nonfiction written with dramatic flair. Even though it was filled with re-creations of scenes he hadn’t witnessed, Capote called his book “immaculately factual.” When researching About Town, however, his definitive history of the New Yorker, Ben Yagoda examined edited galley proofs of Capote’s book. There he found repeated notations by New Yorker editor William Shawn questioning scenes that Capote had re-created. “How know? d[iscuss] w/author,” Shawn wrote continually in the margins. Nonetheless, Capote’s work ran largely as submitted. It turned out that the New Yorker’s editor was right to question his methodology. Since Capote died in 1984, a long list of In Cold Blood’s embellished elements, including an altogether apocryphal ending, has been compiled.
Capote wasn’t the only New Yorker writer whose reporting was more imaginative than immaculate. One profile Joseph Mitchell wrote about a ninety-three-year-old man, complete with an artist’s sketch of its subject, turned out to be based on several men. For his reports from Spain, New Yorker correspondent Alastair Reid cobbled characters together from bits and pieces of actual human beings he’d met, put words in their mouths, created events that happened to them, then sent the results to William Shawn as journalism.
When this came to light, Shawn could not decide whether to defend Reid (which he did) or his magazine’s commitment to accuracy (which he also did). The New York Times had no such ambivalence. In an editorial, they took the New Yorker to task for publishing the reports. “Quotes that weren’t ever spoken, scenes that never existed, experiences that no one ever had—all are said to be permissible in journalism, provided they’re composed by honest reporters to illustrate a deeper truth.” Eventually, of course, the Times itself would have its own problems along that line.
The full flowering of novelized nonfiction took place in the mid-to-late 1960s, when New Journalists were in their heyday. Tom Wolfe, Gail Sheehy, Nik Cohn, and many lesser lights employed dramatic story lines, vivid characterization, and re-created dialogue to produce fly-on-the-wall reportage. New Journalism offered readers considerably less than met the eye, however. Sheehy published an electrifying article in New York magazine, later expanded into a book, about a prostitute named “Redpants” whom the writer ostensibly followed around the streets of Manhattan as she hustled customers at the Waldorf-Astoria and checked in with a pimp named “Sugarman.” There were no such people. Unbeknownst to readers, Redpants and Sugarman were composites of prostitutes and pimps Sheehy said she’d interviewed. New York later ran another piece of Sheehy’s about twenty-four hours in the life of a procurer named David. This article actually telescoped activities that took place over several days’ time. Again, readers were left in the dark. While conceding that this might have been a mistake, New York editor Clay Felker denied that they were putting one over on readers. “We’re just trying to put a greater degree of reality into it,” Felker explained.
The king of New Journalism (and editor of an anthology on that subject) was, of course, Tom Wolfe. Among his colleagues,
Wolfe was far more respected as a writer than as a reporter. The multitude of inaccuracies in an article he wrote about the New Yorker were picked over ad nauseam. Less well known were similar problems in articles Wolfe wrote farther from the scrutiny of colleagues in New York. One of his early pieces profiled members of the “Pump House Gang,” a group of scruffy teenage surfers who hung around an old pump house by a beach in La Jolla, California. Wolfe’s memorable piece of writing portrayed them as an out-of-control group who lived communally, drank daily kegs of beer, mounted toga parties, and toured the countryside east of San Diego engaged in “destructos” (demolishing old barns). After this article was published, the surfers admitted they’d only torn down an occasional barn—at the request of their owners. They confessed to regularly putting on the man in a white suit, much as tribal members pull the legs of anthropologists who come to study them. One pump houser remembered Wolfe as “some weird old man hanging around who asked questions while we made up a lot of the answers.” Other gang members told Jane Weisman Stein of the San Diego Reader that Wolfe’s story reported events that never happened, in particular a toga party no one could remember. Although Wolfe said many of them lived in the garage where they did hang out a lot, most actually lived with their parents.
The epitome of New Journalism’s slippery authenticity was Nik Cohn’s 1976 New York cover story called “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night.” This electrifying thirteen-page portrayal of disco dancers in Brooklyn included an assurance that “everything described in this article is factual and was either witnessed by me or told to me directly by the people involved.” Cohn’s article highlighted a charismatic dancer named “Vincent.” John Travolta later played Vincent in an era-defining movie based on the article, Saturday Night Fever. That movie and the musical play it inspired
made Nik Cohn a wealthy man. Two decades after he wrote his article, Cohn confessed that he’d made the whole thing up. There was no Vincent, just a guy he’d once glimpsed outside a Queens disco, and some blokes he knew back in Britain who provided the inspiration for his story’s protagonist. Even the disclaimer (which Cohn says were words an editor put in his mouth) was jive. “There was no excuse for it,” Cohn admitted in a commemorative essay written twenty years after his short story ran as an article. “At the time, if cornered, I would doubtless have produced some highflown waffle about Alternative Realities, tried to argue that writing didn’t have to be true to be, at some level, real. But of course, I would have been full of it. I knew the rules of magazine reporting, and I knew that I was breaking them. Bluntly put, I cheated.”
The success of such literary inventions put pressure on all writers of nonfiction to follow suit. What’s worse, their competition was not just the fictionalized work of colleagues such as Cohn but movies and television programs that put drama ahead of accuracy. Writers who tried to maintain standards of veracity were not playing on a level field with those who didn’t. H. G. “Buzz” Bissinger, who was able to write the compelling book Friday Night Lights without resorting to invention, lamented to a New York Times reporter that “more and more, the public expects nonfiction books to be like this: to have that perfect, seamless storytelling quality. That’s an impossibly high bar.”
In Cold Blood set that bar. Truman Capote’s approach to writing this book was imitated by many. Popular writers such as Joe McGinnis, Richard Ben Cramer, and Bob Woodward “got inside the head” of their subjects through re-creations that were no more verifiable than Capote’s. Were they authentic? Only the authors
knew for sure. Ultimately it came down to trusting their verisimilitude. Readers obviously did. They made best sellers of such authors’ books. Colleagues were more dubious. In his review of Richard Ben Cramer’s biography of Joe DiMaggio, Wilfrid Sheed said that the author’s overly omniscient “you are there” style only served to remind readers that they, and the author, were not there, and didn’t really know what was going on in the minds of those Ben Cramer portrayed. “By trying to go the truth one better,” warned Sheed, “the famous ‘New Journalism’ continually undercuts it.”
One might imagine that book editors would be staunch allies of those struggling to keep the “non” in nonfiction. Some are. Others aren’t. Jug Burkett said that on two separate occasions he showed editors persuasive evidence that a book they were about to publish was based on apocryphal accounts of combat experience by phony veterans. Both books were published anyway, as “nonfiction.” When significant questions were raised about the veracity of Opening Skinner’s Box, Lauren Slater’s book about famous psychological experiments, her publisher defended it as “first rate narrative.” When Kate Millett took substantial liberties in writing about a 1965 murder in The Basement, such as putting feminist monologues in the mouth of the sixteen-year-old victim, the book’s editor defended his author. “All she has done is take the facts and fill them out,” he said, “—make them come alive by imagination. I think good nonfiction has always done that.”
We’ve come a long way from the time when Frederick Exley called his 1968 classic A Fans Notes “a fictional memoir,” because he’d altered some facts about his life. That gesture of literary integrity would seem absurd to practitioners of New Journalism’s latest descendant: creative nonfiction. “Creative” needn’t imply permission to make things up, but it’s often taken that way. In her
Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek, Annie Dillard wrote a dramatic portrait of her tomcat, a fighter who jumped through Dillard’s bedroom window in the middle of the night, reeking of piss and blood, landed on the author’s bare body, then kneaded her chest with powerful paws, leaving Dillard’s skin red with bloody paw prints. “I looked as though I had been painted with roses,” she wrote. At a public program some years later, an audience member asked Dillard what had become of her tomcat. The author exchanged amused glances with some panel colleagues, then admitted with a giggle that she owned no tomcat and never had. One like it did belong to a friend. With this man’s permission she’d borrowed the saga of his bloody-pawed cat and made it her own.
Like Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek, a remarkable number of noted works of nonfiction published over the past few decades apparently were novelized in whole or in part. They include Sybil, Sleepers, Roots, The Amityville Horror, The Last Brother, Mutant Message Down Under, and a host of lesser-known titles. Any number of manuscripts purchased as nonfiction by editors have had to be published as novels. When the author of the New Agey Indian fable The Education of Little Tree turned out to be a white supremacist and Ku Klux Klan member, his best seller was simply moved to bookstores’ fiction sections, where it continued to sell well.
Such literary fabulists pass their inventions off as facts. Another group—Dave Eggers, Paul Theroux, Rick Moody—flaunt their confabulation and challenge readers to distinguish fact from fiction in their books. As Eggers writes in the preface to his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, “this is not, actually, a work of pure nonfiction. Many parts have been fictionalized in varying degrees, for various purposes.” When it comes to daring readers to distinguish fact from fantasy, Lauren Slater is in a league
of her own. In a memoir called Lying, Slater portrayed herself as an epileptic prone to frequent seizures and blackouts, and with a tendency to fantasize, or possibly not, since she lies a lot. In his introduction to Lying, a University of Southern California philosophy professor said the author led readers to “a new kind of Heideggerian truth, the truth of the liminal, the not-knowing, the truth of confusion, which, if we can only learn to tolerate, yields us greater wisdom in the long run than packaged and parceled facts.” Slater herself made no such lofty claim. She did say that her mother—who variously claimed to be a Holocaust survivor, a hot-air balloonist, and friend of Golda Meir’s—taught her that truth was malleable, and that what you wished you were was just as real as what you actually were.
“She was so full of denial,” Slater wrote of her mother, that “she’s not to be trusted. Then again, neither am I. And anyway, just because something has the feel of truth doesn’t mean it fits the facts. Sometimes I don’t even know why the facts should matter. I often disregard them, and even when I mean to get them right, I don’t. I can’t. Still, I like to write about me. Me! That’s why I’m not a novelist.”
Slater then invited readers to join her on a journey of uncertain veracity based on “emotional memory” more than “factual memory.” Was she hospitalized after having seizures? Or does she actually suffer from Munchausen syndrome? Did she have an affair as a teenager with a prominent married writer? Did he pressure her to have anal sex? Only your memoirist knows for sure. And she’s not telling. Even Slater’s epilepsy may be real, may be a metaphor, some of each, or something else altogether. Who’s to say? After all, wrote the author, “diagnosis itself is a narrative phenomenon.”
When the manuscript of Lying was completed, Slater gave it to six strangers to read. All took her accounts of being epileptic literally.
This discouraged the author. Slater thought it meant that nearly any reader of Lying who didn’t know her personally would be likely to misinterpret what she’d written.
Although some may enjoy the parlor game of trying to decipher books like Slater’s, such fusions of fact and fiction are usually more fun to write than to read. This is why there will continue to be a generous supply of “nonfiction” books that may or may not be based on fact. Those who mingle fact with fiction and call it creative nonfiction argue that they aren’t writing news copy. Unfortunately, it’s hard for those who are reporting news to resist picking up the beat. They’d like to be creative too.
In a newspaper’s worst nightmare, twenty-seven-year-old Jayson Blair fabricated or plagiarized so much material in 673 articles he wrote for the New York Times over four years’ time that his employer was forced to publish a fourteen-thousand-word review of Blair’s transgressions. This front-page article portrayed in painful detail how many times Blair had reported apocrypha as “facts,” pretended to be places where he wasn’t, and borrowed material written by other reporters.
This problem was not the Times’s alone. During a period of heightened vigilance following Jayson Blair’s dismissal, many other newspapers fired reporters who had fabricated or plagiarized material. The most egregious case involved Jack Kelley, a star foreign correspondent at USA Today. During two decades’ time, Kelley’s vivid reporting from hot spots such as Iraq, Bosnia, Chechnya, Israel, and Cuba earned him five Pulitzer Prize nominations. His gripping eyewitness account of a suicide bomber who blew up a Jerusalem pizza parlor nearly won that award. This story was one of many that USA Today subsequently determined was largely imaginary.
(Kelley had described three decapitated heads of victims rolling around the street, their eyes still blinking, something that simply didn’t happen.) The newspaper’s investigation revealed that their reporter not only fabricated material in one story after another, but, once challenged, wrote scripts for friends to follow when pretending to have been his sources.
During agonized postmortems of such episodes, editors and colleagues tried to figure out how these transgressions could have happened. Were they due to a star system that favored charismatic go-getters like Kelley and Blair? A lack of oversight on the part of overworked editors? Or was it a craving for “wow” journalism on the part of editors who suppressed warnings from others and doubts of their own to get great copy?
What seldom showed up in public consideration but did among journalists themselves was the pressure they felt to make their reporting not only accurate but dramatic, and with coherent story lines. On these terms they were not just to report the news but tell a great yarn in the same amount of time that they used to spend just reporting the news. Reporters were supposed to be both Ed Murrow and Ernest Hemingway. Along the way, the reconstructed scene, the imagined conversation, the getting inside the head of your subject, migrated from the pages of books and magazines to those of daily newspapers. “The most ambitious feature stories are expected to emulate the best short stories,” journalist Don McLeese warned in the Austin American-Statesman well before the Jayson Blair episode, “—with the same sharply etched characterization, psychological motivation, evocative description, narrative momentum and moral purpose. Journalists who have spent an hour or two with someone offer the illusion that they have peered through the depths of the subject’s soul—and that the reader can as well.” Something had to give. Too often it was accuracy.
Obviously this emulating of fiction needn’t entail making up news copy out of whole cloth. Under pressure to dramatize their stories, however, some journalists decided that this was the best way to go. Slate once had to retract a column written by a freelancer describing how residents of the Florida Keys used hooks baited with apples to “fish” for rhesus monkeys. After being used for medical research, these monkeys were abandoned on an offshore island. A Slate editor later explained that although the freelance writer had indeed gone monkey fishing, his original account of this experience was rather flat. The editor urged him to incorporate more writerly detail in his story. The freelancer chose to do this by inventing details.
Slate is just one of dozens of publications that have had to retract spurious material in recent years. Even the New Yorker, where fact-checking is such a fetish, ran an “Editor’s Note” informing readers that an article they’d published about a writer’s experience working for a dot-com company had blended fiction with fact. In a humiliating note to its readers, the New Republic admitted that twenty-seven articles it had published by a young journalist named Stephen Glass included fabricated material. Apparently Glass’s material was so compelling that not just the New Republic but several other magazines skimped on fact-checking before running embellished articles he’d written. Many such incidents were reported in the New York Times. Yet, well before they hired Jayson Blair, the Times itself had repeatedly run “Corrections” notices admitting that articles on their pages included invented facts, plagiarized material, or both. Other newspapers, including the Sacramento Bee, the San Antonio Light, the Arizona Republic, the Baltimore Sun, USA Today, and the Washington Post have also retracted dubious stories written by their reporters. In Owensboro, Kentucky, the Inquirer Light had to admit that a heartrending first-person account by one
of its staff members about having AIDS was fanciful.
With its insatiable appetite for colorful copy and high-profile writers, the media are a primary enabler of post-truthfulness. Despite the repeated corrections they had had to run about Jayson Blair’s reporting, the New York Times kept assigning bigger and bigger stories to the energetic young reporter. Even after colleagues questioned the reliability of Jack Kelley’s reporting, editors at USA Today nominated his work for Pulitzer Prizes. The Boston Globe put columnist Patricia Smith up for a Pulitzer long after serious questions had been raised about her veracity. Another Globe columnist, Mike Barnicle, lost a court case for putting words in a subject’s mouth. His employer subsequently gave Barnicle a raise and put his picture on the side of local buses. Smith and Barnicle were finally fired after their journalistic transgressions grew too egregious to be ignored. Soon after he left Boston, Barnicle surfaced as a frequent commentator on radio and television. Stephen Glass parlayed his notoriety into a lucrative contract for a novel about a reporter who makes things up. Jayson Blair got a six-figure advance for a book about his own experiences along that line. His publisher characterized Blair as a “compelling” and “honest” writer. When last heard from, Patricia Smith had signed her own six-figure book contract for a biography of Harriet Tubman. According to Publishers Weekly, Smith planned to “use creative nonfiction techniques to present Tubman as a human being as well as an icon.”
So what? some ask. Wouldn’t readers prefer a story made compelling through artifice to one that’s tediously factual? Wouldn’t you rather read a gripping embellished story than a boring accurate one? Where’s the harm?
Here’s the harm: when a piece of writing labeled “nonfiction” is
made up, even in part, an implied contract between reader and writer has been broken. Their bond of trust begins to fray. “I felt let down,” biographer James Tobin said after learning that Truman Capote had made up the ending of
In Cold Blood. A price must be paid for literary fabulism. In the case of Edmund Morris, even though reviews of the second volume of his Theodore Roosevelt biography were generally positive, some wondered if he’d made up material in this book as he had in
Dutch.
5Each such episode erodes the broader sense of credibility essential for a healthy literary climate. It isn’t just the fabricators who pay the price; it’s every writer who must work in their wake. Reviewers of memoirs routinely question how much of the book they’re considering is true, how much false. Some of the exploits were so dramatic, noted a New Yorker critic of a memoirist’s work, that it “makes you wonder whether the facts in this memoir have been enhanced.”
Up to a point any writer has permission to polish. We hardly expect a memoirist’s memory of dialogue, say, to be word-perfect. If he or she takes minor liberties with chronology, most readers will understand. Do they expect authors of nonfiction to know for a certainty what’s true without a doubt? Obviously not. Those writers can only be expected to make a good-faith effort to verify what they’re writing. But doing your best and getting an occasional fact wrong is not the same thing as deliberately inventing material without letting the reader know. Few enjoy reading a book that purports to be truthful, only to discover that it’s semitruthful
at best. Reading and liking work that’s labeled nonfiction, then discovering it was partly fiction, is like admiring someone you meet, then finding out she isn’t altogether who she said she was. You may still admire that person, and that writer’s work, but now—like Maureen Corrigan reading Vivian Gornick—with your guard up.
Taking creative liberties such as cobbling together composite characters or re-creating dialogue is not a problem so long as readers are clear on the terms. Some authors finesse this issue by admitting that they dropped some fiction into their nonfiction, but in advisories one would hardly be likely to notice. In an Author’s Note at the end of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Berendt wrote that he’d taken “certain storytelling liberties,” but said they had mostly to do with chronology. Girl Rearing, by Marcia Aldrich has a brief message in tiny type on the copyright page that says, “This memoir is centered in my life story, but it is not a literal account of my life. Some incidents and characters are invented, shuffled from life, and recombined. Many names have been changed.” Yet Aldrich’s book was sold as nonfiction. In his best seller The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson first assured readers that his depiction of a serial killer in late-nineteenth-century Chicago “is not a work of fiction,” then in notes at the end said of the protagonist, “I re-create two of his killings” using “threads of known detail to weave a plausible account.” So is The Devil in the White City nonfiction or fiction? In books such as this it’s almost as if we need a third category: faction, say, fact-based fiction, or fictionalized nonfiction.
The real issue is truth in packaging. Book buyers have a right to know what they’re buying. Even Tristine Rainer, who celebrates the mingling of fact and fancy, cautions that readers won’t have a problem with such mingling “as long as they understand what the
writer is doing.” Everyone knows that Philip Roth plays games by mingling facts with fiction. That’s part of this author’s appeal. But Roth’s not trying to fool anyone. He has enough integrity to call his blends of fact and fancy novels. So why don’t more writers follow Roth’s lead and call their fusion works fiction? For two reasons (at least). One has to do with the marketplace: on average, works of nonfiction sell better than ones of fiction. The other is more intangible. Nonfiction writers who fictionalize, then wrap themselves in the mantle of “narrative truth” or “larger truth” or “emotional truth,” get to have it both ways. They enjoy the freedom to make things up while retaining the credibility that comes from calling their work nonfiction.
Another reason for playing games with facts is simple laziness. Tearing down the wall between fiction and nonfiction doesn’t just unleash creative juices, it allows writers to forgo fact-checking. It was easier for Robert Reich to rely on self-serving “memory truth” when writing his memoir than to try to verify what he recalled. One might argue that it takes more skill to write a compelling work of nonfiction that sticks to facts as best the author can ascertain them. I have always told students and colleagues who are tempted to invent quotes (or “pipe” them, as it’s known in the trade) that they can’t possibly improve on things people will tell them if they make the effort to seek them out and listen to their stories. That’s what Nik Cohn discovered. After fabricating his disco-dancers article, a chastened Cohn compensated by becoming a dogged reporter. In the process he found himself talking to people on the streets of New York who were far more intriguing than any he’d ever conjured. As Cohn put it, “what they told me was so vastly more interesting, and, so much wilder and weirder and more heartbreaking than anything I might have invented, that I could do nothing but shut up and marvel.”
The impact of fabrication by nonfiction writers such as the early Cohn is at least limited to the world of letters. Post-truthfulness in the visual media is something else altogether. Because they have so many opportunities to propagate and model their alt.ethics on a massive scale, those who appear before cameras have a much broader impact on our ethical climate. That is why it’s so very important to understand the value system of those whom we see so often on screens large and small.