Fiction? Nonfiction? Memoir? David Sedaris Just Calls His Work “Real-ish”
Count on David Sedaris to sidestep the whole thorny memoir-truth issue with humor. When ‘When You Are Engulfed In Flames’comes out next month, it “will carry a short preface, labeling the contents ‘real-ish.’” I guess I’ve always thought that if 97 percent of the story is true, then that’s an acceptable formula,” he told the Christian Science Monitor.
Sedaris goes on to say that “we live in a time when our government is telling us some pretty profound lies. And then James Frey writes a book and it turns out some of it’s not true. No one asked for their vote back, but everyone wanted back the money they’d spent on that book. We’re in the shadow of huge lies and getting angry about the small ones.”
The issue of how long someone whose sales were predicated on sympathy and trust spent in jail might not seem like a “small lie” to everyone, of course, but yeah, it’s not a WMD-level whopper. So I guess I, like, 97% agree with Sedaris.
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