"to hell with facts, we need stories!" - ken kesey

You know what else gets a bad rap?  Fiction. When I was young, I was taught that in order to distinguish “fiction” from “non-fiction,” all I had to do was think “fake” and “non-fake.”  The trick was helpful, but you can see how fiction was pre-disposed to fight the uphill battle.  I mean, what’s good about being fake?  We’d rather have cold hard facts right?  We’d take the truth over the un-truth any day.  (This is a lengthy blog entry, so if you’re strapped for time, I’d suggest just moving on, maybe come back later.)

You might remember a book by James Frey called A Million Little Pieces (2003), the captivating memoir of a drug/alcohol addict who nearly died, but through a series of incredible events learned through relationships and rehab to like himself again, and eventually, to attain sobriety.  In 2005, Frey’s book had topped the charts as a New York Times bestseller for 15 weeks straight; Oprah Winfrey chose Frey’s memoir for her book club.  Then, in a classic case of media vs. celebrity, a series of investigations revealed that Frey had fabricated a number of the events in his memoir.  Oprah brought Frey back on her show  (the episode was called “the James Frey controversy”) and tore his reputation to shreds on national T.V.  The media jumped all over the story, publishing articles like A Million Little Lies; even “South Park” did an episode about the debacle.   Frey’s publisher, Random House Publishing, was eventually forced to offer a full refund to any reader who claimed they had been “misinformed” (nearly 2,000 readers have since been refunded in full).

If anybody understands our culture’s cravings, it’s the big wigs in the entertainment industry.  This is why you see horror flicks that are “based on actual events,” or love movies that are “based on a true story.”  The question I always hear about Jack Kerouac’s On The Road is: “well did he really do those things or is he just making it up?”  I guess there is a place for these questions, but it’s a tragedy when they distract us from what is truly important: the story itself, and the lessons therein.  For me, Frey’s book was one of the most powerful discourses on “addiction” I have ever been exposed to, extending far beyond the realm of chemical addiction.  I just can’t understand throwing his story into the fireplace, even if, heaven forbid, he was only actually in jail for two months instead of the supposed four.

Besides, “fact” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  Remember how it rocked your world when you found out that your history textbooks might not be 100% factual?  That they might be a “little” bit biased since they were indeed written by the winner?  You would think that, if anything, we could trust a textbook to tell us the truth.  Or how about those discrepancies you found in the Bible, like in the various gospel accounts?  

Here’s the truth, and yes, I mean the cold hard truth.  You ready?  Any time a “story” gets told – the very second that a human being takes charge issuing a narrative, whether it be a novel, a movie, or a simple account of what he or she ate for breakfast that morning – any time a person tells a story, “fact” goes out the window.

Just imagine every member of your family trying to recount the events of a certain Christmas, or two different sports teams giving an account of a game they played against one another.  No matter how hard you try to stick to what “actually happened,” you will never get it perfect.  James Frey is not a liar, neither was Kerouac, neither were Matthew Mark Luke or John (not by any means to compose some list of comparable authors).  They are all beautiful storytellers, and I hope we spend more time appreciating those stories than trying to figure out if they were “real” or not.  If I was a walking video camera, and you were a walking video camera, then maybe we’d give the world a true story or two; it’d be a lame and boring world, but hey, at least we’d have ourselves some facts.

Right now I’m reading a fictional story by Thomas Wolfe.  Wolfe grew up in Asheville; the town in his fictional story is called Altamont.  Now Wolfe called his book fiction, likely to avoid falling into a James Frey-esque controversy, but his novel is undoubtedly based on his young impressions of this area.  When the novel describes springtime, or the nature of the local people, or the patterns of the sky – well let’s just say, it has taught me a lot more truth about my backyard than any National Audubon society field book ever could.

So for anyone who reads “non-fiction,” and refuses to see a movie unless it was “based on real events,” I hate to break it to you, but I doubt that your sought-after stories contain any more “truth” than J.R.R. Tolkien’s the Lord of the Rings.  -This may sound like a heresy, and I hope it does – but even if you can’t quite stretch that far with me, I hope you can justify a place for fiction in your mind, and I hope that when it comes to certain “facts,” you can expose the man behind the curtain.