This issue of truth keeps coming up. I haven’t read John D’Agata and Jim Fingal’s book The Lifespan of a Fact, a contentious back-and-forth between journalist D’Agata and fact-checker Fingal over the many liberties the former supposedly took with certain details in an article about the suicide of a Las Vegas teen. Nor have I seen Mike Daisey’s one-man show The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which apparently made up some facts in its zealous activism over Apple’s use and abuse of Chinese labor. So I can’t say too much about either of these works, but they have both inspired a lot of diverse, thoughtful pieces about our often complex relationship with the facts (although one did so inadvertently) and for that we should be grateful.
Among the pieces: In Slate, my former editor Dan Kois rather elegantly laid out the ongoing debate between “story-truth” and “happening-truth” and found himself caught in the middle. Over at Salon, Laura Miller astutely stuck up for fact-checkers. Meanwhile, at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Colin Dickey defended D’Agata’s chosen genre, the essay form, even though he didn’t quite defend D’Agata himself (who appears to be a somewhat flawed advocate for the role of essayist-artist). Others have chimed in with more personal contributions: the critic Glenn Kenny recalled the time he had to work with David Foster Wallace on a piece about the AVN awards for Premiere; elsewhere, my friend and colleague Alizah Salario recalled trying to teach Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, along with its truthy complications, to high schoolers.
