In an interview on Salon.com Sunday, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Lorraine Adams, author of a new novel, The Room and the Chair, makes a startling assertion: She will never write non-fiction again. 

After 20 years of reporting and writing news stories... I realized that I could probably find out what happened in many different ways, I just couldn't put it in the newspaper, and there would always be something I couldn't get at because I announced myself as a reporter. That frustration built. By the end, the frustration was so unbearable that novel writing seemed to me the only way to approximate a better truth.

She goes on to give an example -- when considering writing about a devastating earthquake in Iran, she says she couldn't write a meaningful book because Iranians who talked to an American about the destruction of their city (and, I assume, more meaningfully, the aftermath) risked prison. She judged that "making" people talk to her and thus putting them in the position of making their situation even worse would have been "unconscionable." From this I understand that she feels it's ethical to write a straight report of the earthquake, but digging any deeper (no pun intended) in order to study the lessons of the quake and (presumably) the government's response is not possible in a traditional non-fiction book. And so she has turned to fiction "to approximate a better truth," or as some have called it, "a larger truth." 
 

The strange notion of 'larger truth' 

This in itself is a strange notion. If the word truth means anything in the context of journalism, it means a straightforward presentation of what is, or what has happened. The trouble comes when a reporter becomes bored with this approach and feels the need to add context, or enliven quotes from a source, or conflate the deeds of people on the scene, or commit any number of the different transgressions a journalist may commit. And those are only the venal sins; what of the mortal sins of invented quotes or wholly invented sources?

We saw an example of this last week when a book by the author Charles Pellegrino,  The Last Train from Hiroshima, was exposed as fraudulent. The book rests on assertions from doubtful sources as well as claims that historical groups have denied. Some brought up other alleged lies the author had previously promulgated, such as his claim that he had invented the submersible robot that discovered the wreck of the Titanic. 

Then there are the authors who embellish or totally invent experiences of their own, the James Freys and Peggy Seltzers.  Frey is of course well-known; Seltzer is the author of a 2008 memoir in which she claimed to be, in the words of a New York Times article, "a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods." Well, she was not, but she was trying to "put a voice to people who people don’t listen to," in her awkward phrasing.

Claiming to have been a white Blood in South Central is only a little less ridiculous than having claimed to be a Jewish orphan raised by wolves during World War II, but that indeed is the theme of a purported memoir by Misha Defonseca entitled Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years. That book, like another Holocaust memoir, Angel at the Fence, was utter lies. Defonseca, who was not even Jewish, rationalized her actions (when exposed) by saying her parents were resistance fighters who were arrested by the Nazis, and that therefore she "felt Jewish," and believes the story "was my reality, my way of surviving."
 

Why embellish already dramatic events? 

The phenomenon of false books about Hiroshima or the Holocaust is perplexing. Weren't those events dramatic enough? Do people have to invent related events and historical characters to make them even more dramatic -- and if so, why? The answer, based on the success of all of the books mentioned here, is clear: Such stories are very popular, and can be turned into lucrative media properties. Director James Cameron, after all, says he still wants to go ahead with a film based on the Hiroshima book, demonstrating the attitude that a little truth ought not to get in the way of a good story.

The obvious question is, if you feel obliged to embroider real events, then why not simply write a novel? It turns out that labeling your work as fiction does not guarantee you a pass. Consider the strange saga of the JT LeRoy hoax, in which a thirty-something female veteran of phone sex hotlines created a persona of a barely 21-year-old homeless former truck stop prostitute with AIDS who wrote  a novel "of lyrical and grotesque beauty, without losing any of (the) authenticity" (from the New York Times review of Sarah -- a judgement which seems sadly mistaken now, at least as far as the authenticity part). 

The JT LeRoy books were never advertised as anything other than novels, and yet their popularity was based, at least in part, on the readers' assumptions that their author had a history in common with that of the marginalized characters he/she wrote about. When the identity of the secretive JT LeRoy was exposed, a lot of people were pissed. The writer Violet Blue captured the outrage when she compared Albert to other:

... women who were trying to contrive tough backgrounds or make it seem like they were "edgy" or living life on the fringes, and that writing about porn and sex was one of their bullshit "street cred" tools they were using to shape their image to ... get a book deal, or become famous, or get back at daddy ... whatever.

So authenticity is both a major selling point and a kind of guarantee of authority. It's not enough to write a good book. If you're writing about something outré, you have to be identified with the experience itself.

I think this comes from a good impulse: We want those who speak for the Other, the marginalized, to really know what it's like to be marginalized; it's no good making it up. Your writing may be convincing, but it's not enough; you have to have gone through the crucible yourself, so that you can appear on Oprah and talk about it.  

Thus James Frey's apologetic appearance on Oprah, in which she raked him over the coals for having hoodwinked her and her audience. (Last year she acknowledged she was too hard on him.) Frey only embellished details in what was advertised as a memoir; at least parts of A Million Little Pieces were sort of true. JT LeRoy's books -- and that of Seltzer and Defonseca, as well as those of a fake Navajo who called himself Nasdijj -- were complete fabrications not only of people and events but of an entire autobiographical persona.
  

The pitfalls of seeking 'a larger truth' 

Whoa, how did we get here from wholly guiltless author Lorraine Adams, the former Washington Post reporter? It was that phrase she used, "a better truth." That way lies perdition, cautioned journalist Roger Rosenblatt, writing in Time in 1984: 

When journalists hear journalists claim a "larger truth," they really ought to go for their pistols. The New Yorker's Alastair Reid said the holy words last week: "A reporter might take liberties with the factual circumstances to make the larger truth clear."

O large, large truth. Apparently Mr. Reid believes that imposing a truth is the same as arriving at one. Illogically, he also seems to think that truths may be disclosed through lies. But his error is more fundamental still in assuming that large truth is the province of journalism in the first place. The business of journalism is to present facts accurately -- Mr. Reid notwithstanding. Those seeking something larger are advised to look elsewhere.

Adams did look elsewhere -- to the novel. And the fact that its plot is built around entirely fictional events (a fighter jet crash into the Potomac River) means she's already avoided the pitfalls awaiting a Pellegrino on one hand or a  LeRoy on the other. 

But look at the context of Reid's remarks on "the larger truth." He was excusing himself for fabricating details of articles in the New Yorker -- pretty much the same thing Pellegrino is accused of doing. In fact, Reid's fabrications were quite troubling. He admitted inventing facts and people in articles over a period of more than twenty years, saying that without spicing things up, "it would be terribly boring for the reader."

What use are Reid's articles today in determining any sort of truth? Who knows by now what really took place in the scenes he reported, which of the people quoted really said what they were reported as saying, or indeed if these people even existed? If I were a historian or a scholar, his work would be useless.  It couldn't be taken seriously, just as no one will ever again be able to take seriously anything written by Pellegrino. 

I wish all reporters and writers were as scrupulous as Lorraine Adams, unwilling to endanger her sources and at the same time unwilling to bow to the censors of Iran. In her retirement from journalism, and in her taking up the business of fiction, I think our world has lost something -- no matter how good her novels are.

Note: This post was edited to add the first name of director James Cameron.