Other people’s words about … truth
In a work of nonfiction we almost never know the truth of what happened. The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction, where the writer faithfully reports on what is going on in his imagination … The facts of imaginative literature are as hard as the stone that Dr. Johnson kicked. We must always take the novelist’s and the playwright’s and the poet’s word, just as we are almost always free to doubt the biographer’s or the autobiographer’s or the historian’s or the journalist’s. In imaginative literature we are constrained from considering alternative scenarios — there are none. This is the way it is. Only in nonfiction does the question of what happened and how people thought and felt remain open.
From ‘The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes’
by Janet Malcolm
I was disabused of the notion that memoirists and autobiographers write ‘the truth’ a long time ago, after I read, and wept over, James Frey’s ‘memoir’ A Million Little Pieces, only to discover subsequently that he had made up much of what he had written about within it. Since then, I’ve learned to take anything I read in a piece of nonfiction with a huge pinch of salt.
Like most people, though, I am still used to thinking of works of fiction as telling something that is the opposite of truth. I think of them as stories, things that exist only in our imagination. I love the way that Malcolm, in the passage above, subverts this concept of the truth. In doing so, she tells us something far more truthful, I think, about the nature of truth.
Interior versus exterior:
Grass trees from a distance
It was my mother who introduced me to Janet Malcolm, after a conversation we’d had about nonfiction writing. I found Malcolm’s thoughts on the problem of truth in biography and other nonfiction writing illuminating, even though the passage I’ve quoted from is now more than fifteen years old.
Truth versus fiction, internal truth versus external truth, interior versus exterior. How much of what we see and read and think is subjective and biased? How much can we ever say is true?
Interior versus exterior:
Inside a grass tree
Lately I’ve been reading about …
Meanwhile, here’s what I’ve been reading online lately:
- Why Salt Lake City might just be the perfect writer’s retreat.
- Though I am not a huge fan of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, I still found this article, on why the search for happiness often ends in making us only more miserable, interesting.
twenty-one words 
Interesting to ponder. Truth is a spectrum, it seems, and subject to change. I’ve always been fascinated how multiple witnesses to an event can end up with very different reports.
I’m currently reading ‘The Geography of Bliss’ by Eric Weiner. Humorous and a bit ridiculous that he is paid to travel the world to research happiness for this book. The only secret to happiness is that it is an ‘inside’ job. Abe Lincoln sums it up best: “Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.”
Yes, indeed, Eliza: happiness is an inside job. That’s a good description! 🙂