A Million Little Fabulists

Having spent some time now on the outskirts of both the book business and the fact-checking business, my first inclination when someone asks - as Rod does today, of the latest critically-acclaimed, basically fraudulent personal history to hit shelves and then get pulled from them - how a publisher could have possibly allowed themselves to be taken in by one of the seemingly endless slew of memoirist-cum-fabulists, my first instinct is to sympathize with the publisher in question. People usually assume that books are held to a higher standard of accuracy than, say, magazine pieces - after all, they're longer, more detail-rich, and more expensive to produce and market, so you'd think they'd be subjected to more scrutiny as well. But in reality, precisely because books are so much longer and more detailed than magazine articles, fact-checking becomes a luxury that your typical cash-strapped, time-strapped publishing house can't afford. The Atlantic, for instance, probably fact-checks about 50-75,000 words per issue, or about 600,000 words a year; to match our rigor, Simon and Schuster (to pick a publisher at random) would have to fact-check around half a million words for the first half of March alone. Which means that publishing-house editors are more or less at the mercy of their writers' honesty, particularly in a genre where the line between fact and quasi-fiction is always going to be at least slightly blurry. If they can't sniff out a gifted faker through some sort of sixth sense, they don't have anybody else to do it for them - until, that is, the book comes out and the wisdom of crowds (or angry sisters) takes over the fact-checking job for them.

As I said, that's my first instinct. But Rod's right: The list of fabulists has grown too long, and as resource-strapped as today's publishers may be, if you can't do just a little due diligence on a memoir whose subject matter - a white girl growing up among black gangs in South Central L.A. - sounds like it was, well, invented to sucker a publishing house, you deserve all the ignominy that's about to be heaped on the saps at Riverhead Books.

Comments

At least this fabulists are using their own words, unlike White House SuperChristian Tim Goeglein. And their lies aren't getting thousands of people butchered and maimed, unlike the lies of Dumbya and Cheney. It's hard to get all that worked up about non-memoirs if you have a proper perspective.

Posted by TheBannedMoeLarryAndJesus | March 4, 2008 11:26 AM

At least these fabulists are using their own words, unlike White House SuperChristian Tim Goeglein. And their lies aren't getting thousands of people butchered and maimed, unlike the lies of Dumbya and Cheney. It's hard to get all that worked up about non-memoirs if you have a proper perspective.

Posted by TheBannedMoeLarryAndJesus | March 4, 2008 11:26 AM

"Too good to be true" is not going to be a successful argument against "There's no such thing as bad publicity".

Posted by MattF | March 4, 2008 1:31 PM

At least these fabulists are using their own words, unlike White House SuperChristian Tim Goeglein. And their lies aren't getting thousands of people butchered and maimed, unlike the lies of Dumbya and Cheney. It's hard to get all that worked up about non-memoirs if you have a proper perspective.

Posted by ThePleaseBeReBannedMoeLarryAndJesus | March 4, 2008 1:32 PM

At least these fabulists are using their own words, unlike White House SuperChristian Tim Goeglein. And their lies aren't getting thousands of people butchered and maimed, unlike the lies of Dumbya and Cheney. It's hard to get all that worked up about non-memoirs if you have a proper perspective.

Posted by ThePleaseBeReBannedMoeLarryAndJesus | March 4, 2008 1:34 PM

Interesting piece in that right-wing rag the "New Yorker" c/a 1998-99 showing, at great length, how reading too much of Rebecca West's "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" led Clinton to fall for the fatalistic "it's all ancient hatreds" view about Bosnia and thus uphold the "international community's" criminally mistaken arms embargo that stopped the Muslims of Yugoslavia exercising their Second Amendment rights in self-defence.

However, since the Muslims of Yugoslavia were targeted for deliberate genocide by non-Americans, rather than killed by well-intentioned but incompetent Americans, and since their case doesn't furnish any ammunition against Bush-Cheney, we can safely assume that Moe won't lose any sleep over their fate.

Who are you voting for, Moe? Kucinich's out of the race, Hillary voted for the War For Oil, and Obama wants the US to invade Pakistan.

Posted by Rod Blaine | March 4, 2008 1:36 PM

And Margaret Meade's rubbish about sex in Samoa caused a great deal of damage to American society. Some gullible types still believe it today.

Posted by Rod Blaine | March 4, 2008 1:40 PM

a white girl growing up among black gangs in South Central L.A.

I believe that it's a "half-white, half-Native-American girl" growing up among black gangs in South Central L.A.

Posted by right | March 4, 2008 1:53 PM

yes, Right, that "half native american" probably made all the difference to Riverhead. Suckaz.

Posted by trevor | March 4, 2008 2:22 PM

I suspect Rod Blaine will still be playing But, But, But, Clinton on his deathbed. Those of us who live in the present don't really see the point of such stupidity.

Despite what moronic wingnuts think, criticising Dumbya and the Bushpigs doesn't constitute an endorsement of Clinton.

Posted by TheBannedMoeLarryAndJesus | March 4, 2008 2:37 PM

I remember thinking the daughter's room photographed in the original NYT article really did not look like it had been decorated by someone who grew up in the ghetto. I guess now I know why.

And what was up with the dude recovering from the "gunshot wound" staying at her house? Was that just part of the hoax?

Posted by vanya | March 4, 2008 2:42 PM

"I believe that it's a "half-white, half-Native-American girl" growing up among black gangs in South Central L.A."

Also, not likely that she would have been placed with a black foster family.

Posted by CParis | March 4, 2008 3:43 PM

I think it's a fair point that publishers don't have the time to fact-check all or even most of the details in the manuscripts they get. But honestly, how hard would it have been to check the basic facts of the author's life, to make sure she really grew up in a foster home in the hood as her story claimed. The impression this incident gives is that there is virtually no factchecking done at all.

Posted by Beem | March 5, 2008 12:46 AM

It's funny how this issue gets so much attention but you seldom hear anyone asking why uber-lesbian Mary Cheney got a huge advance for a book that sold basically no copies. Just one huge bribe to the sucktastic Cheney family.

Just bring on more Saint Reagan letters to "Mommy" and keep the idiots happy. I guess.

Posted by TheBannedMoeLarryAndJesus | March 5, 2008 1:04 AM

It is really a question of publishers not having the resources to check -- or is it that book publishers do not share in journalistic tradition of fact checking.

It seems to me that authors have been making shit up and publishing "nonfiction" with impunity for a long time, probably as long as the category has existed.

And publishers don't care. "True" life stories sell better than mid-list fiction. If publishers take on the responsibility of determining whether all these stories really true, well then they are going to have to spend a lot of money just to find out they can't market these books as easily. If publishers refuse to vet, then they can claim to be victims of the charade as well.

This didn't start with James Frey, and it won't end with whats-her-face, because the book buying audience wants to read something that has the form of a satisfying work of fiction but is still literally true.

Publishers don't want to kill one of their remaining cash cows

Posted by Michael Canfield | March 5, 2008 2:07 AM

MIchael is correct that book publishers have never shared in this tradition, at least the commercial publishers. Not that they don't care at all, a good editor will argue issues of fact with an author, but they don't pretend it's theirs to control for two reasons.

First, in book publishing, the burden of truthfulness is contractually on the author, who both warrants and indemnifies the publisher against any legal implications that arise from a lack of truth. Publishers care about books being factual to the extent that they can get sued. As the deep pockets, they're not likely to recover from the author significant damages they might be held to pay, even if the contract says the author owes them.

Two, a standard author contract with a major publisher has a clause stipulating that, other than issues of grammar and punctuation, they are not allowed to change the manuscript without the authors consent. Legal issues could lead them to reject the manuscript, but they cannot materially alter a manuscript without the author's permission.

As a result, publishers look more closely at manuscripts where issues of fact have the greatest legal implications. They'll look more carefully at a manuscript that might subject them to a libel suit (and they get legal readings on such manuscripts all the time, which are quite costly) than they would on a made-up tale about life as a gang member. They'll care more about the facts in a book that advocates for a natural cure for cancer than one about someone's crazy childhood.

It's not that they don't care, it's that they focus it where a lack of truth can do the most damage. Book authors own their work in the court of public opinion and that's the way both sides seem to want it.

Posted by dm | March 5, 2008 1:37 PM

Rod Blaine, this is so incoherent & moronic it is amazing:

You discuss "the "international community's" criminally mistaken arms embargo that stopped the Muslims of Yugoslavia exercising their Second Amendment rights in self-defence."

Does the Constitution govern the former Yugoslavia? The Second Amendment is a universal guarantee of rights? Somebody better tell the people of the UK (and many, many, many other countries) about this astonishing new discovery.

You. Are. An. Idiot.

Posted by Second Amendment | March 5, 2008 2:18 PM