4. Lying Ass Liars and the Distrustful Seeds They Sow
***This is work from an 8-part series (Truth, Lies & Bullshit in the Art of Creative Nonfiction): Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Works Cited (includes intro and sections).***
Then, there are those writers that flat out lie. They purposefully create whole memories and market them as the complete, sho-nuff truth. Moore gently counsels about these dishonest behaviors, “Are you remembering something a certain way in order to make yourself look more like the hero of a situation, or in order to cast your lazy brother-in-law in an even more unpleasant light? If so, you are being dishonest.” He compels the writer of these dishonest nonfictions to explore more complex truths for “a richer, more interesting story” (16).
There are plenty of outright liars in the literary field. These writers depend on the gullibility of readers and the authority of authorship. In Three Cups of Deceit, famed investigative reporter and nonfiction writer Jon Krakauer outs Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea for, not only making up a pivotal story of an event that triggered a multi-million dollar charity, but also questioned the support the charity provides. Mortenson’s persona and mission have become the point of contention for the subsequent investigative reports generated by Krakauer’s book (Krakauer).
David Lazar discussed another author, Lillian Hellman. She wrote an essay titled Julia that detailed activities of the author involved in smuggling money, and saving Jews and Catholics “in peril” but the activities she listed never happened. They were completely made up. Lazar writes: “Did Hellman ever admit the fabrications? No. (And note the force of nonfictive gullibility among readers: why did anyone believe that a Jewish American playwright went on a covert mission to Berlin in the late thirties?)” (109).
Part of the controversy surrounding truth in nonfiction is that we assume that though memory is fallible, Google is not. We sometimes ignore the black/white nature of some facts and label them as memories of consensus; and due to ease, have taken to fact-checking even small, minute details. The current readership of nonfiction is a bit distrustful given the betrayal felt by readers of James Frey, Greg Mortenson, Margaret Jones or Lillian Hellman, to name a small few. [Margaret Jones, author of Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival and an affluent writer from the suburbs made up a distressing tale and marketed it as her life. Since the original writing of this analysis in 2013 even more authors were called out for marketing their fictive works as nonfiction: Somaly Mam for The Road of Lost Innocence, Wednesday Martin for Primates of Park Avenue, David Brooks for The Road to Character, and Alex and Kevin Malarkey — real name! — for The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven.]
In Truth in Personal Narrative, Vivian Gornick discussed this climate of distrust and offered some solutions. She feels that “…memoirs belong to the category of literature, not of journalism.” She also believes that “it is a misunderstanding to read a memoir as though the writer owes the reader the same record of literal accuracy that is owed in newspaper reporting or historical narrative” (Lazar 8). She calls for an “informed readership” after reflecting on reader misunderstanding regarding her prose and persona (Lazar 10).
Some nonfiction writers have taken pains to detail contracts and agreements with the reader to inform them of the truths available in their prose. Some writers write disclaimers (before being exposed instead of after as in the Frey example above) at the beginning of their books notifying readers of where the prose deviants from the accuracy of verifiable truths. Others might remark on dialogue and caution readers not to disbelieve simply because of quotes and the impossibility of carrying a tape recorder throughout all of life’s conversations. Writers like Philippe Lejuene, as he does in The Autobiographical Pact, might use an elaborate diagram to detail the genre of a proposed piece of writing to inform readers of the weight behind a material and how to interpret its life narratives.
Still other writers propose very strict standards. In an article titled, Why Nonfiction Writers Should Take A “Vow of Chastity” Roy Peter Clark adapted a set of rules he encouraged other nonfiction writers to follow. Clark used the DOGME 95 manifesto by Danish film makers, termed a “Vow of Chastity,” to uphold a strict set of artistic rules limiting scene manipulations. Clark’s vow starts with the stipulation that “any degree of fabrication” causes a nonfiction work to become fiction. According to his logic, stories that are “mostly true” are fiction; plain and simple. He also notes that omission does not make a story false but fake names do (though consistent identifiers like “The Tall Woman” can be used). He also says invented dialogue cannot be used (Clark). So far we might be running into some pretty dense, clunky creative nonfiction, even if the story is factually “true.”
Admittedly, Clark’s tight set of rules offers nonfiction a way to become, once again, a trusted genre. If all writers would begin to approach their creative nonfiction work with a consistent set of standards (similar to but perhaps not as strict as Clark’s) nonfiction authors would make great strides in reassuring readers of the honesty and truth available in our works.
Still, some writers and readers believe that no matter the agreements nothing is true because trust is for sale when publication is on the line. They believe that as soon as something is forged with the idea of being marketed it becomes untrue, contrived, and false. Other artists like Su Friedrich have a more complicated view. Friedrich’s Seeing (through) Red was a review of her film Seeing Red and an attempt to capture the Truth of what she was trying to communicate to her audience. Through providing “an annotated version of [her] recent video” she presents her struggles, both on- and off-camera about her experience as a speaker and producer of a diary film to strike at the truth of her intentions and feelings in a moment in time as a 50-year-old woman. She reviews not the truth of facts or history, but the truth of experience and intent: “When the camera was humming in the perpetual present, I just said what I thought and then hit the wall of no more thoughts and instead of meeting that with silence, I did a little verbal dance of departure that let me off the hook” which she then ponders as dishonest (Lazar 155). By the end of the essay, however, she doubles down on truth by noting that even though she might perform or let herself off the hook, even that is truth: “Which pretty much sums up my experience about making video. For all that I wanted it to be a heartfelt, honest, probing account of my thoughts and feelings, I felt in the end that the whole video was ‘a fucking performance,’ as is the vast majority of my life” (Lazar 161).
***This is work from an 8-part series (Truth, Lies & Bullshit in the Art of Creative Nonfiction): Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Works Cited (includes intro and sections).***
