Many years ago, when I first
started teaching college writing, I prepared for a conference with a student by
reading her narrative essay on a summer experience as a life guard. The story focused on the narrator’s dreary
summer job being a lifeguard at a local public pool. It was late August, and the newness of the
job had faded long ago; now there was just day after day sitting on a high
chair beside the pool in the blazing summer sun. It was hard to stay focused, and one day, at
the other end of the pool, a small boy slipped under the water. The narrator, glazed with boredom, failed to
notice that the boy never surfaced. But
someone else did, and he dove into the water and pulled the boy up on the deck,
frantically trying to resuscitate him. Waving her off, the narrator’s
supervisor took over. Overwhelmed with
guilt and blinded by tears, the young lifeguard staggered into a poolside room,
pressed her back against the cold cement wall, sunk to the floor, and held her
head between her knees, trying to catch her breath after each wave of
sobs. As some point, she sensed there is
someone else in the room, and when she looked up the narrator saw through the
blur of tears that it was the boy, and that this was the men’s room, and that
the boy was standing in front of a urinal, peeing with apparent satisfaction.
I
was taken with this ending of the narrative, and looked forward to talking with
my student about why it seemed powerful—for one thing, the juxtaposition of the
mundane (a boy urinating) and the profound (life and death)—and how this
implied meaning made her story far more interesting to me.
“You liked that
ending, right?” my student said after she sat down in my office.
“Oh, yes,” I said.
“I thought you
would,” she said.
When
my student said this I began to wonder about the truth of the ending. “The boy in the bathroom, it really happened
right?” I said.
“Well,
no,” she said. “But don’t you think it
makes the story so much better?”
In the years since then, I’ve
thought a lot about why I was so disappointed by the student’s confession. I’ve also taught a great many of what we’ve
come to call creative nonfiction courses, and I often tell the story to my
students and ask them if they would have been disappointed if the student had
made the same confession to them.
Opinion is divided. Some say they
aren’t disappointed at all, that the student writer was writing “creative”
nonfiction, and this must certainly mean taking some imaginative liberties with
the material. Essentially, the argument
is this: If it makes the story better
and it feels truthful then it’s okay
to go ahead and make things up. On the
other side, of course, are people who are offended by my student’s
invention. They complain that it “ruins”
the entire story for them, and makes the narrator seem like someone who can’t
be trusted. This argument rests on the
premise that an implicit contract has been violated between reader and
writer. In nonfiction, you simply don’t
make things up.
These days one of
the hottest topics in creative nonfiction is the ethics of lying. I probably don’t need to list too many of these controversies. They’ve already gotten considerable ink. Perhaps the most famous was the confrontation
between Oprah and James Frey. In his “memoir,”
A Million Little Pieces, Frey
apparently invented, among other things, how much time he spent in jail after a
drug-crazed confrontation with Ohio police.
Frey said he spent 3 months. The
reality, critics charge, was that Frey was in jail about three hours. Frey’s Oprah moment was similar to a public
controversy over another memoir Augusten Burroughs , Running with Scissors. The
eccentric family portrayed in the book said Burroughs made things up about them
that simply weren’t true. Burroughs
maintained that he didn’t take liberties with the truth, arguing that the story
he told in the book “was not my mother’s story and it’s not the family’s story,
and they may remember things differently and they may choose to not remember
certain things, but I will never forget what happened to be, ever, and I even
have scars from it and I wanted to rip those scars off of me.”
Most recently, we
have the case of John D’Agata, an essayist who teaches in Iowa’s writer’s
workshop. D’Agata’s essay on the suicide
of a Las Vegas teenager had been rejected by Harper’s, the magazine that
commissioned it because of “factual inaccuracies.” Another magazine, The Believer, agreed to
publish it but wanted to do some fact-checking.
Seven years later, after much haggling between a fact checker named Jim
Fingal and D’Agata, the piece was finally published. The recently published Lifespan of a Fact is a book that chronicles their disputes, and
the following interchange between Fingal and D’Agata was typical:
In D’Agata’s manuscript, he writes
this:
On
the day that Levi Presley died, five others died from two types of cancer, four
from heart attacks, three because of strokes.
It was a day of two suicides by gunshot as well. The day of yet another suicide from hanging.
When the
fact-checker called the coroner’s office, he discovered that there were
actually eight heart attacks in Vegas that day.
The ensuing conversation went like this:
Jim: John, should we change this “four heart
attacks” to “eight?”
John: I like the effect of these numbers scaling
down in the sentence from five to four to three, etc. So I’d like to leave it as it is.
Jim: But that would be intentionally inaccurate.
John: Probably,
yeah.
Jim: Aren’t you
worried about your credibility with the reader?
John: Not really,
Jim, no. I’m not running for public
office. I’m trying to write something
interesting to read.
Jim: But what’s the point if the reader stops
trusting you?
John: The readers
who care about the difference between “four” and “eight” might stop trusting
me. But the readers who care about
interesting sentences and the metaphorical effect that the accumulation of
those sentences achieve will probably forgive me.
Jim: I guess I’m confused: what exactly are the
benefits of using “four” versus “eight” in this sentence?
John: I’m done
talking about this.
