{"id":2906,"date":"2006-01-20T02:53:00","date_gmt":"2006-01-20T02:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=2906"},"modified":"2017-12-22T07:19:59","modified_gmt":"2017-12-22T13:19:59","slug":"when-nonfiction-writers-take-liberty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2006\/01\/20\/when-nonfiction-writers-take-liberty\/","title":{"rendered":"When Nonfiction Writers Take Liberty"},"content":{"rendered":"

As much as I hate to admit it, I enjoyed Mark Morford’s column "I Wanna Be A Crackhead Author:
\nHello, I am an ex-hooker heroin addict with AIDS who eats live puppies. Please read my book<\/a>". A taste:<\/p>\n

I shall start my story humbly, meekly, just like JT LeRoy and James Frey. Small town, somewhere in Idaho or maybe rural Montana, brought up by a sadistic pedophiliac Pentecostal preacher father who only has one good arm and a decimated colon, and a narcoleptic mother with 17 cats who sucks down cases of Tab and reads the “Left Behind” books as nonfiction and who passes out every night in a Percocet haze watching endless reruns of “Knight Rider.”<\/p>\n

Me and my two sadistic, ADD brothers will sneak off to the local zoo for days at a time and sleep with the monkeys and torture penguins with fireworks. I will suck on my first bong at age 4 and will be stone drunk by 7 and will regularly black out by age 10, but not before impregnating my pothead babysitter and stealing her credit card to buy a Game Boy and a small Cessna, which I will promptly fly all the way to Mexico before crashing into a tortilla factory and breaking my spine in 12 places and rupturing my kidneys, which I will pay a Mexican mafia doctor named Mannie 50 bucks to swap with black-market kidneys stolen from unwary tourists. Oh my yes. I can see it now.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s not exactly discouraged in college narrative nonfiction writing classes that you enhance your memories or history to make a better narrative that’s more gripping, illustrative, or humorous than the events that have actually happened to you.<\/p>\n

Why, even I, your humble unreliable narrator have embellished certain things in my own essays to make a point. For example, I created this whole beautiful wife<\/a> thing out of whole cloth, culminating in a fictional pregnancy to increase my traffic (or I have invented the invention<\/i> of her to prove a point about embellishing–sorry if this paradox has caused unKirkian patched PCs to shut down and free the Enterprise crew and Harry Mudd).<\/p>\n

The key, though, is to know a limit between embellishing and fabricating. In one, you’re exaggerating for effect something that really happened, and in the other, you’re exaggerating for effect something that didn’t really happen.<\/p>\n

I only hope that I know the line. If not, I hope to be very celebrated and successful with my undiscovered deception.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As much as I hate to admit it, I enjoyed Mark Morford’s column "I Wanna Be A Crackhead Author: Hello, I am an ex-hooker heroin addict with AIDS who eats live puppies. Please read my book". A taste: I shall start my story humbly, meekly, just like JT LeRoy and James Frey. Small town, somewhere […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2906"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2906\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18959,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2906\/revisions\/18959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}