Monday, May 21, 2012

The Ethics of the Lie in Creative Nonfiction, Part 1


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.

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