You Can't Handle the Truth: Fact vs. Fiction and the Fuzziness of Truth in Literature

In one of my weekly strolls through the New York Times, I stumbled across several articles that grabbed my attention.

A class-action lawsuit has been filed against President Jimmy Carter and Simon & Schuster--who published Carter's "Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid" in 2006--alleging that the book was "falsely marketed as an accurate account of peace negotiations in the Middle East." David Schoen--the attorney who filed the suit--remarked that "You cannot market it as the absolute truth on something when it's not."

Kathryn Stockett--the author of the best-selling novel, "The Help," is being sued by Ablene Cooper--a 60-year-old woman--who alleges that "one of the book's principal characters, Aibileen Clark, is an unauthorized appropriation of her name and image, which she finds emotionally distressing."

Two lawsuits--one alleging that a non-fiction book is mostly fiction and one alleging that a fiction book (at least one of its central characters) is mostly non-fiction--will be heard in the near future. If the past holds any clue as to the outcome of both suits, they will either be settled out of court or dropped entirely.

I imagine that Freedom of Speech will be argued, and--unless either case involves a clear case of libel or slander--Freedom of Speech will prevail.

Which brings me to my sudden interest in these articles. I've been posting my unpublished (mostly) fiction on another blog and it has brought up some interesting questions. First of all, I'm not the least concerned about libel or slander in my fiction and non-fiction alike...I'm very careful that all of my characters, incidents, locations, and names are either the product of my imagination or are used fictitiously. With that said, regardless of the fact that I write "fiction," it is often based on at least the emotions behind events that I have either experienced first hand or have read about, heard about, saw on television etc. etc.

Because of the dismal (albeit darkly funny and introducing a ray of hope) nature of most of my fiction, I'm not a fan of the assumption that I'm writing about my own life. While I hope my fiction contains universal "TRUTH," it is far from anything embedded in reality. And thankfully so. Regardless of the fact that some of my stories may start out based on a "real" event, by the time I'm finished, it's hard for even me to distinguish between the two. With that said, I would say that ALL fiction has at least one foot planted--however precariously--in some sort of "real" experience.

And to bring this full circle, I would say that ALL non-fiction has at least one foot planted--however precariously--in the things of the imagination. A book--no matter how fastidiously researched and vetted--always comes to the reader through the lens of its author. I may see something one way and someone else may see it in an entirely different light. What we choose to call something, doesn't make it so.