In the Search for Truth, book and magazine publishers are running into a few problems. Herewith two new trends in the reality business:
The continuing hoo-ha over the latest publishing fraud, the Valley girl who posed as a druggie gang member, brings up the question of where to draw the line between writers with vivid imaginations and out-and-out liars.
Truman Capote, who invented the non-fiction novel, was not always the most fact-checkable of journalists. He had a storyteller’s way with the truth. His writing and even his casual conversation abounded in astonishments, wondrous coincidences and weird juxtapositions.
But Capote was a novelist at heart, and his talent earned him some leeway as a fabulist in matters of little moment. In fact, the writing of “In Cold Blood” was, in part, a challenge he set himself to tell a journalistically pure story that would have the richness of his fiction. He knew the difference.
Today’s fake memoirists either don’t know or don’t care.
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In an era of fake memoirs, Esquire now gives us a new variation on masturbatory journalism–the fictional diary.
For “a conceivable chronicle of Heath Ledger’s final days,” the editors explain, “writer Lisa Taddeo visited the actor’s neighborhood, talked to the store owners and bartenders who may have seen him during his last week, and read as many accounts and rumors about the events surrounding his death as possible. She filled in the rest with her imagination. The result is what we call reported fiction.”
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