On (Creative) (Non)-Fiction and Accurate Facts

In this article from Slate Magazine, Dan Kois reviews the book The Lifespan of a Fact, which involves the fact-checking of an essay written by John D'Agata and includes the essay, the comments by the fact-checker, and D'Agata's responses to the fact-checker (Jim Fingal). As if the book itself weren't confusing enough, Kois includes his own story about meeting Tim O'Brien in this review, and subsequently fact-checks the review here. Although the majority of Kois's review seems to imply that D'Agata is a jerk for fudging facts to suit the aesthetics of his essays, his own fudging of facts in his review suggests that the exact truth is undesirable in a creative essay, if not impossible. Kois takes both sides in the argument for truth in non-fiction, and leaves his reader (or at least this reader) suspicious of all authors' veracity, not simply that of D'Agata.

D'Agata's argument in terms of his essay's lack of truth is that "it's called art, dickhead," but why write in a nonfiction genre and then make things up? Why was it important for Kois to pretend he had interviewed D'Agata and Fingal rather than simply read their book? I understand that the non-fiction writer wants to arrive at a particular, perhaps essential, truth with his essay, but changing the facts in order to point to this truth seems to me to undermine everything. Furthermore, what's the point of having a fact-checker at all if you simply don't plan to write facts in your work? People want to read essays and memoirs because they purport to tell true stories, amazing or poignant or moralizing, but true. No one's preventing D'Agata from writing fiction about teen suicide and tae kwon do, and this type of realistic fiction would certainly sell. Maybe these little manipulations of fact don't matter, but if not, why manipulate facts at all?

Internet Cross-Dressing, or, The Altruistic Impersonator

Many of you may have seen this story about a blogger who recently revealed that she was not, after all, a gay Syrian woman who went missing, but a heterosexual American man who had been impersonating one online for several years. The actual blogger, Tom MacMaster, confessed to his deception only after the story of Amina Arraf fell to pieces under outside scrutiny (including that of the State Department), saying:

I never expected this level of attention. While the narrative voıce may have been fictional, the facts on thıs blog are true and not mısleading as to the situation on the ground. I do not believe that I have harmed anyone — I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about.

I'm reminded both of Greg Mortenson's story and that of teen prostitute JT LeRoy/housewife Laura Albert, and I wonder how many more stories like this there are. MacMaster claims he wanted to bring important social issues to light, but something about his "six-month friendship" with a woman with whom he "exchanged some 500 emails" and several photographs suggests more selfish motives. Other than a picture of MacMaster and his wife vacationing in Damascus, there is no mention in the article of his level of knowledge about Syria or oppressed homosexuals, and I wonder where he got the material for his blog. I also suspect that "Amina" went missing just as her followers started to become suspicious of her existence, but I begin to conjecture.

Perhaps the blog "Gay Girl in Damascus" raised positive awareness about a real issue, and maybe no real harm was done, but I see the time and resources spent looking for an imaginary missing person as depleting resources for real rescues of and aid to real people. It's probably true that gay people are arrested in Damascus all the time, so shouldn't we help them instead of playing at being one of them?

Philanthropy Through Lies, Or, The False Memoir

Few have been able to escape recent discussion of Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea and its inaccuracies/lies/libel, and likely much more insightful things have been said than I will produce here, partially because I must admit that I have not read Three Cups of Tea and did not intend to either before or after the scandal. If you want accurate information about the story you can find it here or here or here. I do have some things to say about the purposes of lying, however, and I also wonder what my readers think. Mortenson's book, about founding schools for girls in Afghanistan, has helped his foundation, also created to run schools in Afghanistan, raise millions of dollars. In order to help sell his book, Mortenson apparently made up a story about being nursed back to health by Afghani villagers after a failed attempt to climb K2. Or perhaps you would like me to rephrase: in order to raise awareness about the need for schools for girls in Afghanistan, Mortenson embellished a story about the kindness of strangers and overestimated the number of schools formed out of his life-altering experience. It is undoubtedly true that Mortenson has worked to found schools in Afghanistan, many of them for girls, so should we care that he wasn't nursed to health or kidnapped by Taliban?

It's difficult to say. Perhaps the whole issue should be a matter of where money is currently going and how effectively it is forming and maintaining schools. My blog is not about philanthropy, however; it is about lies. People lie, embellish, exaggerate, falsify, and prevaricate "for good" all the time, and in many cases we just assume it is happening. Is Greg Mortenson's dishonesty worse than James Frey's, for instance, because Frey only duped Oprah and got millions of people to buy a really crappy book, while Mortenson acquired actual money on potentially false pretenses? Is the main issue money, then? Should we distinguish among who lies to us in what contexts for what goals?