The publication of The Lifespan of a Fact, which is based on seven years of email exchanges between writer John D'Agata and fact-checker Jim Fingal, has prompted a lot of thoughtful discussion (an excerpt from the book ran in this month's Harper's). Unmentioned up till now, however, is that while D'Agata was emailing with Fingal, he also was engaged in a tense exchange with another fact-checker charged with readying one of his essays for publication. It was to be an epic piece of writing: concerned with the depletion of Lake Michigan's resident sturgeon population due to faulty Federal government practices, the essay also included relevant meditations on the Oneida Indian tribe, ATM skimming devices, the BP oil spill and the Chicago Cubs. This was to go into a limited-edition magazine, Room Service, which was going to be printed on thin birch slats and distributed in André Balazs' network of hotels. Though the magazine was never published, we were able to procure the correspondence between D'Agata and Darren, the fact-checker interning for a semester (for no credit) in the basement of the Chateau Marmont.
Darren: Hi, John. My name is Darren, and I'm the intern at Room Service that will be fact-checking your piece. It was a thrilling read. My concern is that the Chicago Cubs didn't win the World Series in 1987.
John: “Piece?” I’m afraid I’m not sure I know to what you’re referring. Little help?
Darren: Hmmm. The essay you wrote for us. It’s great. :) There are just a few questions.
John: Oh. Essay is... better? I prefer to think of what I do as an experience. At a minimum, I expect five-sense engagement with any competent reader. I’m talking taste buds. Smell. Otherwise I should hang it up. Or you should do some better reading. Either way, you won’t need to fact-check this, uh, “piece.” How adorable. Print it or kill it.
Darren: Maybe we can compromise? Everyone here wants to print it.
John: Is English really your first language?
Darren: Yes. (???) About this Cubs thing, should we not just admit the Minnesota Twins won it all?
John: As I said, that's not a big deal. The “piece” (gag me) is just more dramatic with the Cubs winning it all. Can you feel the wave of relief that would wash over the city if this happened? It's important for me to give that to the people of Chicago. To grant them that.
Darren: I'm thinking that they probably can't really enjoy that since it didn't happen.
John: That’s a detail that no one cares about.
Darren: Okay. So, regarding the fire that both teams played through, at Wrigley Field, that carried on for two games, I found no evidence of that either.
John: I’d be really upset right now if that was my problem. It’s yours. Own it. Try it on like rubberized fishing waders.
Darren: I can't imagine anyone would let them play through it. I did find that in September of 1987, fire trucks were called to an apartment located what looks to be a few blocks away from the ball field. Ultimately that was reported as smoke from a burnt piece of toast, and no damage was done. And that would have been weeks before the World Series that the Cubs did not play in.
John: Until you’ve been near a fire, don’t presume to know the fear that hangs as heavily in the air as the smoke it produces. This fall classic was played under the threat of real uncontrollable fire. And the wooden bats... the objects these men swung to earn a living, were among the most tempting to the fire’s kiss.
Darren: I will concede that if the burnt toast somehow produced a fire that then engulfed the apartment, and the apartment building, and went into the street, and if there were tens of thousands of gallons of an accelerant poured into the street and contained there, almost like a canal, which led directly into the stadium, and into the dugouts near the wooden bats, it would be lethal. Especially if the city just stood by and did nothing, and did not have a functioning fire department, or had a fire department, but they somehow put all of their trucks on the interstate and drove them at high speeds to, say, South Bend, Indiana, and ignored the fire, and everyone on the Chicago Cubs, and the Miami Dolphins (who are a football team by the way, and have never been in a World Series) just stuck around, yes, it would be dangerous.
John: You're right. As I pointed out in my essay, the Chicago Fire Department didn't come because it was Easter Sunday.
Darren: I'm pretty sure that the CFD has to work on Easter. At least some of them.
John: Oh, you know this? Who’s getting loose with the facts now?
Darren: Well, the World Series is not played on Easter.
John: Duh. But in my mind it was crucial that people in the stands were wearing bonnets and seersucker. Face it, my gift doesn’t recognize your calendar.
Darren: And they never played a doubleheader in the World Series of 1987. You say the fire lasted for two games.
John: Readers don’t care about this. They will never question it.
Darren: And the a-ha “Take on Me” video was not... I haven't found any confirmation that it was inspired by the Chicago Cubs. The guy ramming into the cartoon walls does not burst into the stadium and put out the fire. These guys were from Norway. And the song came out well before 1987.
John: Oh, well, a woman at a bar told me that. She once slept with an MTV VJ who told her all about the video’s earlier cut, that, in fact, included such a scene.
Darren: Do you have her name?
John: No. I never ask people their names. That’s so stupid. People clam up when you ask shit like that. I am not a reporter.
Darren: Liz Phair didn’t throw out the first pitch that day.
John: No one cares. She had her finger on the pulse in Chicago at that time and, as a stylist, that’s a collage I am allowed to paint. Liz Phair, The 2nd Chicago Fire, The Cubs, a boy who built a hot air balloon that runs on vomit.
Darren: I don’t think we can get away with this. Liz Phair wasn’t popular until later.
John: Is it harmful? No. Lives might even be saved.
Darren: The band Styx did not turn the Chicago River into the River Styx once a year to perform “Sailing Away.”
John: How does that make you feel though? Good, right? Like a sexual act that includes a Banana Split?
Darren: People at nursing homes were not released into the wild to forage for Polish sausage.
John: Small liberties.
Darren: Barack Obama did not play Cameron in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. He did not help Ferris catch a foul ball. Neither of them had sex with Mae West.
John: They couldn’t even find his real birth certificate, right? Everyone writes his own autobiography.
Darren: They did not drive to the game with Steve Bartman.
John: We’re done here, Darren. You print it or I take it somewhere else. As a chapbook, I think I could get low six figures.
Darren: You did get the color of Bartman’s turtleneck right.
Related: What It's Really Like To Be A Copy Editor
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Would you prefer "YES" or "<3" to express my thanks?
@theSprawl People making it not nonfiction?
this is the problem with creative nonfiction, it's mostly fiction. and be careful how you treat the intern, he will be your editor someday
@theSprawl It's not the problem with creative nonfiction; it's the problem with John D'Agata.
why not just call it fiction? that way no fact checking required
@theSprawl Autobiographical fiction doesn't sell anymore. James Frey had his novel rejected something like 40 times. However, his "memoir" sold almost immediately. Nearly the exact same manuscript.
@skyslang Kathryn Stockett seems to have done well with The Help
@skyslang This is the real issue we should be discussing here. Why does the "you can't make this up" and "it's better because it's true" school always get a pass? Total bullshit. Total Bullshit is also the title of my pro-fiction manifesto.
The editor should have instructed the intern about how to handle the essay. Why rip the kid a new one when it isn't his fault? Fact checkers save journalists' asses all the time, this author isn't a journalist and he makes that clear. I would have told him to fuck himself.
@theSprawl correct me if I'm wrong, but this appears to be a parody. as such, neither the editor, the fact checker nor the author is real...
@Meghan Flaherty@facebook I'm an idiot! But they could have been real and see my comment below
@anybody: even the birch slats worked for me. OK, I didn't read the whole thing, I violated the basic principle & philosophy of The Awl. Thank god the intellectuals rescued this discussion.
This "article" has turned me on to a world of story-truth and theory-nonsense that confuses and infuriates me. So, thanks?
@transcendental floss "yes" !!
I'm automatically team fact-checker (even a fictional one) due to the douchiness of the author's "Here are my biceps" pose.
This is just mean-spirited (as are several of these comments), and basically reveals a fundamental lack of understanding of D'Agata's point. Disagree with him, fine, but understand what it is you are disagreeing with. You know, there are a lot of people who react with cynicism and mockery to modern abstract artists like Jackson Pollack and Marcel Duchamp too, for example ("My 5 year-old could do that! This isn't art!"), but their mockery just reveals a basic ignorance about the whole philosophy behind modernism and postmodernism. They reveal their own idiocy. Same here. Disagree with his point, fine, but thoroughly understand his point first. Categorically dismissing it (and him) as nonsense to be mocked just reveals your own lack of understanding about what he is doing.
@M.E. I believe the issue with D'Agata isn't that my five-year-old could do that, it's that my five-year-old shouldn't do that.
@M.E. But aren't you just revealing your own idiocy by categorically dismissing this parody? Have you read the book? Because I actually think this (ahem) "piece" could only be written by someone who fully understands -- and fully disagrees with -- D'Agata's intellectual stance.
@M.E. I think you need to recursively repeat your point a few times so that its liminality can be properly internalized.
@M.E.: So far, everything I've read about D'Agata suggests he's using "It's art!" as an excuse to ignore some of the real challenges of writing. I haven't read "What Happens Here," but it sure seems like he neither had to come up with his own compelling story (one of the hard parts of fiction) nor organize an account of frustratingly inflexible reality into a consumer-friendly narrative (one of the hard parts of commercial nonfiction). That is a pretty sweet gig! If you were a reasonably adept prose stylist, you could probably come up with some half-baked, tired line about "What is truth, anyway?" to justify the whole endeavor, too.
That said, I'll bite: Please, enlighten us as to D'Agata's point.
@Multiphasic
Yes, I understand completely. I have read his work and know what his philosophy is. Incidentally, it is not what I practice in my own writing, so I am not even saying I agree with him. But he makes valid arguments and I feel that he should at least be taken seriously. He's not playing with facts to be flip or because it's easier as a writer. And there is a good reason why he actually wouldn't like the word "piece" and insists on the word "essay", for example. He's not doing that to be snobby or artsy fartsy or ridiculous. It's because he recognizes that as long as we continue to be unclear about the difference between essaying and journalism (or even "nonfiction" as a vague, catch-all phrase that lumps them together), then this conversation can't even happen. I suppose that this parody gets under my skin a bit because it seems to be mocking that distinction as a pointless, elitist gesture, when in fact D'Agata has a more sophisticated reason for it. I actually don't agree that this parody recognizes that, no. Also, frankly, I kind of think that parody in general is dismissive by nature. I kind of feel it is a mean-spirited type of discourse. It's refusing to take someone's work in earnest.
@Moff: Please listen to 7:56 onward at http://ttbook.org/book/john-dagata-and-jim-fingal-lifespan-fact . John D'Agata does a better job than I do in explaining his point.
@M.E. and all: I've not read the book, guess that is an important precursor to getting the point. No I didn't understand it was parody, let it serve as a lesson about reading stuff on the Internet before morning coffee. As a post-college fact checker some years back, I can tell you with authority that these snarky conversations with authors actually happen in real life
@M.E. I've yet to see any validity to D'Agata's argument. (I've read the book, "The Lifespan of a Fact.")
He actually *is* playing with facts to make things easier for him as a writer. He says as much, several times, in the book. D'Agata has already reached the conclusion he thinks is important, and then massages other facts to bolster that. Reality didn't work out in D'Agata's favor -- one of the bigger ones being that there was actually a separate jumping suicide on the same day -- so he contorted it to work out in his fiction.
I also think he's self-serving when he argues about the difference between an essay and a journalism piece. He's at least completely mistaken. D'Agata *needs* the truth(iness) of the event because D'Agata wants to draw cosmic conclusions about the very nature of being from that truth. But! He also wants the artistic freedom to change -- sometimes drastically -- the facts. He still wants the reader to come away feeling that a point about the world has been made, even if, to make it, D'Agata has to traffic in lies and subterfuge to do so.
The guy's made of snakes, essentially.
@M.E.: Yeah, no. I listened, and while I surely agree that our culture's relationship with art tends toward the infantile, I don't see how John D'Agata changing facts in his essays does anything to improve that. I don't agree that "we need to be tricked" to really appreciate art or for art to shift our way of thinking. I don't see how that tracks logically, nor does it conform with my own experience (or, I'm sure, that of millions of other people).
D'Agata can call himself whatever he wants (though in that interview, he does argue that the genre of "nonfiction" -- his word -- ought to be given more flexibility to be fictional, so he's not even that rigorous with the flimsy nomenclature defense), but to the reader with no knowledge of his work, it's sure going to look like nonfiction journalism, and I don't see what there is in the writing to tip them off that it's not. Even if trickery were necessary, there's nothing artful about it if the trick isn't eventually revealed. Yeah, I guess if you've followed the whole saga -- not just his essays, but the fact-checking book and all the attendant reviews and interviews -- then you're on to it. But then his shtick seems more akin to long-form multimedia performance art. And the point is just not profound enough to warrant that.
Sorry, man. I agree with Laura Miller's take at Salon (linked at the top of the post). D'Agata comes off like such a self-important ivory-tower stereotype that if he showed up in a work of fiction, I'd be annoyed with the author for churning out such a cliché. And honestly, when you complain about "refusing to take someone's work in earnest," you do too. The audience has no responsibility to approach a work of art in earnest, particularly not when it sets off bullshit detectors all over the place.
@M.E. I think if you're going to claim that other people are misunderstanding (or erroneously portraying) D'Agata's "point" that you incur a responsibility on yourself to explain what *you think that point is* rather than punting to an interview.
I've read D'Agata. I think he's flat out wrong. Both incorrect in terms of aesthetics and wrong on an ethical level. He wants to claim the right to make up stuff-- largely so that preconceived notions he has about the materials he's writing about will fit. But the nonfictioneers job is to deal with the world as it is (or rather as it is perceived through their own subjectivity) and then respond to that. For example, in the Harper's excerpt D'Agata changes a character's background so that it will emphasize the transient nature of Las Vegas. But what her actual background shows is that that view of Las Vegas-- a hackneyed, cliched one, btw-- isn't as true as one would assume had they not done any research.
@Isaac Butler@facebook
I assure you I am not as capable as the man himself in articulating his point, and I thought that people wanted to understand his personal philosophy, but if you want his point in my words, it is that an essayist is neither a journalist nor a "nonfictioneer." You will note that D'Agata avoids the "nonfiction" catch-all phrase, so the very premise from which you argue what his job is, is already inherently flawed. That's part of his point. Nonfiction is not an appropriate term, because it fails to distinguish essay from news journalism from magazine article. D'Agata is talking about essaying- an attempt to explore a subject and NOT a reporting of facts. As he says, yes, he researches a subject. But he then uses his material for a different purpose than a journalist. An essayist wants to provoke emotion or thought about a subject, a larger "truth" that perhaps might be better revealed through more artful arrangement and manipulation of the research material. If you want factual representation of a story, read magazine articles or a newspaper. If you want to contemplate the larger themes and meanings of a story, read an essay. It seems absurd to me to look to artful prose for "the facts." We don't ask that of other art. Perhaps it would help to compare this to the field of photography. Is Dorothea Lange a hack? She examined poverty in America with her photos, but those photos were absolutely staged and manipulated, even though the subject matter existed in real life. "Lange's best-known picture is titled "Migrant Mother." The woman in the photo is Florence Owens Thompson. The original photo featured Florence's thumb and index finger on the tent pole, but the image was later retouched to hide Florence's thumb." Wow. She fudged "the facts"! Is Dorothea Lange suddenly not documenting reality, unqualified to have shown us anything about poverty in America? No. If we draw parallels, I would call Dorothea Lange the essayist, and a photographer on assignment for a newspaper covering an event the journalist. Why do people seem unable to apply the same latitude to the art of writing? Why the dogged insistence on absolute factuality at the cost of artfulness? Why the binary of fiction/nonfiction? We don't insist on that in any other artform. If a plein-air painter adds a tree where there was no tree, or puts a tree from somewhere else next to a house, does that mean he suddenly is doing a different kind of painting? Do we call bullsh*t? Or do we see that the artist is trying to communicate something about the reality he has seen by massaging the details?
@M.E.: Of course there are degrees. Retouching "Migrant Mother" maybe isn't all that problematic, but one hopes you'd agree that, say, Photoshopping an antigovernment protest to make it look like protesters were kicking the shit out of a police officer is a different story. The question is, would Lange's work have been stronger if she hadn't staged an manipulated her images? Would she be as venerated today if the staging were more widely known? Could she have shown us something more genuine about poverty in America if she'd been more willing to wait for Bresson's "decisive moment"? Or was she really telling us a romantic story of her own making, and if so, is that an unequivocally positive thing? I mean, Rush Limbaugh tells his listeners a romantic story that he makes up every day, and he could argue too that he's "trying to communicate something about the reality he has seen by massaging the details."
Ultimately, the thing is, there isn't a surplus of dogged insistence on absolute factuality. In every medium, from every outlet, from The New York Times down to the comments on some lady's Tumblr, you're going to find that plenty of latitude is given to the delineation between fact and fiction. We are not suffering from a dearth of people who shape the facts to fit the story they want to tell. Quite the contrary. John D'Agata isn't really filling a void here.
@Moff And I have heard John D'Agata say (perhaps even in that radio interview I posted) that there is a line for him. We all sort of intuitively know that line. But changing the number of strip clubs from 31 to 34 or a minor character's residence from Las Vegas to Mississippi isn't going to alter the main gist of the essay. I equate it with Lange's editing out of a thumb. Yet people freak out when an essayist does it because they are applying their expectations of journalism to it, which is simply not the genre that essay is. Most people are not aware of the distinction because popular culture makes no overt distinction. John D'Agata is trying to make the distinction.
@M.E.: Yes. By writing essays that look like nonfiction journalism but aren't, John D'Agata is definitely clarifying for the rest of us that you can write essays that look like nonfiction journalism but aren't.
@M.E. actually, the retouching done by some of the WPA photographers during the Dust Bowl became hugely politicized when it was exposed. Cf. this Errol Morris entry on the scandal that enveloped Arnold Rothstein when it was discovered he had moved a cow skull to a more artful position (that also happened to frame the case of the plight of Dust Bowl farmers more starkly.) http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/the-case-of-the-inappropriate-alarm-clock-part-1/ It was used by opponents of FDR's policies as evidence of fraud. The world we live in today is at least as politicized.
D'Agata is going down a similar slippery slope, trying to warp reality to his own preconceptions. There's no need to lie to create literature, but D'Agata is either too arrogant or too contrarian to see that. Of course essays can explore subjective reality, but the piece he was writing was about very real events, and his attitude about it is disrespectful to readers and to many, many writers who are far better than he is. Look at what Ian Frazier does with reality, or John Sullivan, or McPhee, or Katherine Boo. There's a reason McPhee's legendary class at Princeton is called The Literature of Fact. D'Agata has achieved nothing out of this but to make himself a laughingstock.
I have nothing witty to say, just want to register my massive approval of this.
@M.E. @Moff Excellent response Moff. I might add that what D'Agata is writing used to be called "autobiographical fiction". But, as James Frey can tell you, there is not a market for such fiction anymore (if there ever was it was in the 60s with such novels as The Bell Jar, etc). Call his work fiction and Mr. D'Agata doesn't sell, call it non-fiction and it sells. Yes, it's a sweet gig. It is also a potentially well-paying gig.
I'm lost...hahaha...
I just re-read this article w/posts and can't believe how stupid I was this morning, actually was in some kind of stupor, and how much smarter I am tonight! Thanks to The Awl.
too much can't take it
Which MTV VJ was it? It was Martha Quinn, right?
@scroll_lock How adorable.
Oh man this is awesome.