Facts Are Stupid: An essayist and his fact-checker go to battle over the line between true and false.
“Story-truth,” Tim O’Brien wrote, “is truer sometimes than happening-truth.” He wrote that in a story called “Good Form,” in his collection The Things They Carried, a hybrid of memoir and fiction that was a touchstone for a generation of writers looking for new ways to tell stories. That book was published 20 years ago this month, and in February of 1992 I met Tim O’Brien at a reading at the Milwaukee Art Museum on the shore of Lake Michigan. It was so cold that day that water blown off the lake encased rows of trees by the shore in ice, and, depressed and 16 years old, that’s how I felt—as if a thin shell covered me, dulling the outside world, chilling me to the bone.
I’d read the book already, and its effect on me was to inspire a devotional trust in its author. He’d been so clear in the book about what was real and what might not be, and why some things were real and some things were not, that I felt I could tell him anything. He was wearing a sport coat and a Red Sox hat just like the one in his author photo, and, giving me a warm smile, he shook my hand.
“I don’t know what to do,” I blurted out.
The essayist John D’Agata makes an O’Brienesque claim about the difference between story-truth and happening-truth in his new book The Lifespan of a Fact (Norton). “If a mirror were a sufficient means of handling human experience,” he writes, “I doubt that our species would have invented literature.” D’Agata spent seven years arguing with his fact-checker at the Believer, Jim Fingal, over an essay about a Las Vegas teen who leapt to his death from the tallest tower on the Strip. Lifespan dramatizes that debate. In the center of each page is a paragraph or so from that essay, “What Happens There,” as it actually appeared in the magazine in 2010; surrounding it in red and black are fact-checking notes from Fingal, and D’Agata’s dismissive replies.
Both the writer and the fact-checker get more outraged as the book goes on, but it’s D’Agata’s voice—caustic, angry, sarcastic, and self-righteous—that dominates. I was curious: Is John D’Agata as much of a jerk as this book makes him out to be?