Thank you, Jack, for a very thought-provoking story. Somebody's got to look out for truth in advertising here, regardless of what it takes to sell a book. I am with you, and don't believe that "fictional" humor should be sold as nonfiction. Would these books be lost in a humor section of the store? If they're sold in the nonfiction area, can't the publisher add a sticker or humorous disclaimer about the "almost true" tales of David Sedarus?

Otherwise we really are getting taken for a ride, and I for one care about that. As much as Sedaris has entertained me, I don't like the cavalier attitude of either him or his publisher's marketing, and would like to see this subject brought into the light of day. Don't publishers have some sort of fiction forum in which they agree on things like this, or have we reverted to some sort of atavistic state in which publishers print whatever they want on the cover and wait to get sued?

Hey literary litigators, someone out there up for a class action suit demanding truth in nonfiction?

RE: you "don't believe that 'fictional' humor should be sold as nonfiction."

As I mentioned before, when you try to stuff creativity (a round peg) into our ready-made categories (a square hole) then the only option becomes to squash that creativity.

We should be extremely wary of doing that.

We should be the one adjusting our genres to fit the creativity of people like Sedaris.

If he and his publishers cannot find an appropriate "genre" in which to market themselves, the fault lies with the lack of availability of genres;

not with Sedaris or his publisher.

Yeah, ShivaShankar, it is a delicate question. I haven't seen your earlier posts on another thread.

But there is a point to be made here about setting expectations for what the customer is buying. Let's say I read Sedaris and then retell a part of it at--let's say--some social event. The listener responds, "Oh, did you see Jack Shafer's article, where Sedaris admits 'that didn't really happen'?" Okay, then, I'm feeling a little foolish. Of course who else cares about that, but there goes my trust for the writer's veracity. What else in that book didn't really happen?

So then Sedaris is writing fiction, or some new form of art where the point is irrelevant. So let's say all the Sedaris readers see the same Shafer column I did, and while they did not buy the book because it was truth, but instead because Sedaris is funny, they are disappointed too.

Does a little of the shine come off Sedaris' image? Yeah, probably--one thing we like about him is his informal tone, just as when my best friend tells me some confidential story over coffee. I accept it as true. When I find out it's not, I feel punked. It's a little breach of the social contract. When the teller responds by saying "grow up--I was spoofin' you"...well then, now I'm a little insulted.

Just as "words have meaning", "meaning" has meaning. Should Sedaris address this problem differently? I would.

Or am I missing your point?

If "truth" is not an outdated concept--at least in the print and broadcast arts--then don't we need some kind of agreement as to what it is?

I listened to Ira Glass' "The Story" --which purports to deal in "true" stories--recently and got really captivated by the tale of a guy who wound up somehow on a newspaper staff, and began just filling his business articles with stuff he just made up. He soon found out that his words had an impact on the fortunes of whatever company he was writing about. The teller was as captivating as the tale. It was later disclosed -- also in Slate, I believe -- that the teller was not just a liar in the news articles he "published", but in fact the very tale he told to "The Story" was false.

Not just me, but many others were fooled by that story. And apparently it was enough of an issue that Slate published an expose of it.

So apparently there is some agreement here, that if it's sold as truth, it should be true, and if it's something else then our expectations should be adjusted.

Ah hell, what do I know...maybe chaos is the new order!

For anyone to expect a humorist to portray only factual information, then expect that information to convey humor, is to wish for a journalist, not a humorist.

It appears that your quest for purity in comedic non-fiction is to eliminate the perspective of the author, in which case I have to wonder why you weigh in on issues of humor in the first place?

I would ask you, then, if real-life influences in fiction works warrant a non-fiction label? There's not an author, living or dead, who has not used perspective in fact, or real life in fiction. Writing is not a black-and-white affair, nor has it ever been.

That you find it so easy to label creative non-fiction as somehow dishonest is very telling of your taste, and little else.

It may be sold as truth, but how important is truth to the value of the product?

Sedaris' work certainly doesn't belong with the body of political writing where individual authors tout their own grasp of the truth while contradicting the truth as endorsed by others. Truth certainly isn't a standard that is stringently adhered to in the field of nonfiction, even when it is important to what writers hope to accomplish. Even if there were an attempt to hold some sort of standard for truth, that concept is so poorly defined and so dependent on individuals' perceptions of the world around them that opportunities to discern truth from fiction without controversy would be very rare.

Take, as an example, James Watson's The Double Helix, which has been widely criticized by others involved in discovering the structure of DNA as excessively dramatizing their endeavor, focusing on personal interests and conflicts that were blown out of proportion and failing to communicate the professional nature of their endeavor. Whether Watson maliciously chose to distort actual events, or whether this is how he experienced those same events is not a question open to factual analysis; instead, as Sir Lawrence Bragg suggested, the book is best read with the understanding that it provides an account of things that happened, and therefore qualifies as non-fiction, but does so in a way that is determined by only one individual.

The consequences of accepting this approach are even less substantial in the case of Sedaris' work; the purpose here is not to inform readers of the details of events but to entertain. To that end, Sedaris is apparently very successful, and so the cost of accepting that his work might not describe events with mathematical precision is to low to entirely disregard the connection that it does hold to reality.

Certainly, there is nothing to be fooled by unless one assumes high-enough standards for human communication to run the risk of being made a fool.