What's the line between works of fiction and works of non-fiction?

Cafe Society
1

This might be better suited for IMHO or Debates but since it involves books (and to a lesser degree movies) I’ll put it here.

Some books that are released as non-fiction are demonstrably proven to be works of fiction. Some of the more famous:

*James Frey’s Million Little Pieces, which has several major “essential to the plot” moments that never happened.

*JT Leroy was a male former child prostitute and memoirist who turned out to be a middle aged female writer) so that’s a no brainer- it’s fiction.

*Clifford Irving’s collaborative “autobiography” of Howard Hughes (which, from the sections I’ve read, is excellent incidentally) was a hoax; Irving had never had contact with Hughes.

Other memoirs later proven fake.

Some books are trickier however. Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil for example:

Non-fiction-

*John Berendt really did live part time in Savannah in the 1970s and 1980s

*He really did get to know many of the people involved and many local eccentrics

*Most of the stories and people in the book are real or based, fairly closely, on real people and events

*Jim Williams really did go on trial 4 times for murdering his out-of-control redneck boytoy and really did hire voodoo priestesses (and even mentioned the “psycho dice” game from the book in his will)

*Berendt really did attempt to do a piece on a black debutante ball that was crashed by the Lady Chablis

Fiction:

*Berendt inserts himself in several scenes to which he was not actually a witness (e.g. his encounter with Jim Williams’ out-of-control drugged up redneck toyboy never happened; Berendt didn’t even meet Williams until after the murder

*The book is generally “de gayified”- Berendt (who is openly gay) comes across as an asexual and sometimes invisible narrator (a not bad in and of itself stylistic choice) but in fact most of the people he got to know early in Savannah were fixtures in Savannah’s gay scene (e.g. Joe Odom- the horndog who lives with Mandy in the book- was in fact a more-often-gay-than-straight bisexual who only had a platonic friendship with Mandy) and in fact many of the anecdotes in the book were stories he heard, at least initially, as gay bar gossip

*Berendt never actually went with Williams and Minerva (the voodoo priestess) to the cemetery, the event that actually supplied the title; he got the story first-hand from someone who had and in conversations with Williams and Minerva

Now, on the one hand it’s easy to say “Well, Midnight is a work of fiction because Berendt wasn’t where he said he was. OTOH, if Berendt had classified it as fiction, that would have been problematic as well since the key characters- Lady Chablis/Joe Odom/Jim Williams/the other kooky and spooky characters really were real people and actually people he knew

Some of the events he tells about really were things he did participate in. So… ultimately it’s a blend of fiction and non-fiction, but which would you count it as and why?

On the other extreme, having lived in Milledgeville (where Flannery O’Connor lived), some of her characters are very clearly based on actual (non-famous) people and events in the town- she never denied this. Milledgeville history is also mined for the novel Paris Trout, in which though the names are changed (including the name of Milledgeville, which was silly since he identified its stand-in of Cotton City as the Civil War capitol and practically includes a street map) the story of Trout himself- his loan sharking to the black community, killing a little girl whose brother owed him money for a car, the way he avoids prison, his abuse of his wife, his increasingly psychotic paranoia that includes covering the floor of his bedroom in glass plates (to see if somebody has walked in) and putting lead sheets and pots under the bed (in case somebody tries to shoot him from downstairs), and the murders/suicide that occur during a Sesquicentennial celebration that makes people mistake the gunfire for fireworks, his safe being opened after his death to find jars of urine and no money- ALL of those actually happened (though the real man’s name was Marion Stembridge instead of Paris Trout). Dexter changed very few things in packaging it as fiction- he added a fictional romance twixt Mrs. Trout and one of the lawyers her husband killed (which was rumored to have actually happened), added a backstory to the black girl Trout/Stembridge killed (she’s now a foster sister instead of a biological sister to the man who owed Trout money), adds a couple of side characters and another victim of the killing spree (not an ‘important’ one).
Calling it fiction without even a “based on a true story” byline seems more like cheating that calling Midnight non-fiction.

A very similar thing happened in the movie To Die For, the Gus Van Sant/Buck Henry/Nicole Kidman movie that’s at least as close to the Pam Smart story as the Pam Smart Story. A sociopathic social climbing young New Hampshire teacher has an affair with a teenaged student from a dysfunctional family, hires him and a doofus friend (for a ridiculously small amount of money and some CDs) to kill her husband, and the plot is unraveled by a female classmate who she’s threatened to kill and called “white trash who nobody will believe”; they changed the ending of the true story The Pam Smart character is murdered by a mafia hitman hired by the husband’s family and the husband’s ethnicity was changed to Italian (in reality I think he was part Italian) and there’s some dark humor added, but any fool could see the inspiration, yet it bore the "any resemblance to real people is coincidence” disclaimer in the credits.

Compare this to Bully, a film about the real life murder of ‘bully’ Bobby Kent, in which more liberties are taken than with To Die For or Paris Trout. Among the biggest is that the real Bobby Kent was a 6’1 first-generation Iranian steroid abusing bodybuilder (pic) is changed to a far more Anglo and almost impossible to buy as physically intimidating Nick Stahl (the scrawny actor dwarfed by Charlize Theron inthis pic).

So, at what point does a book or film become fiction in your views (i.e. beyond the embellishments or license covered by the standard “some events have been changed…etc.” disclaimer)? And should works like Paris Trout or To Die For- works of “fiction” that are completely identifiable even to details- have to have disclaimers stating “This is a work of fiction inspired by x y and z” instead of the “this is a work of fiction and any resemblance to real people living or dead is coincidental” disclaimers that both in fact have? (The same could be asked of episodes of Law and Order and other shows where real life recent cases are dramatized almost event per event.)

2

I take a pretty rigid position on this. Anything that’s not a reference book, a historically accurate biography/autobiography/memoir or a account or analysis of actual events is fiction. Anything “inspired by” or “embellished” is fiction. Period.

Works of fiction often use real events and people to develop a story. Real news events and politicians are commonplace. Just about anything set in the real world is going to have a lot of fact and truth in it. If any of the story is made up or told in a first person account that the author is speculating on is fiction nevertheless.

Every one of your examples are clearly and completely fiction. I would like it if works like those were very clear about what was inspired by or based on real events, but I don’t think we should expect it or require it. It’s the authors choice, however I think that authors who misrepresent this stuff not for stylistic reasons but to intentionally mislead should be publicly shunned and discredited.

3

Sometimes it’s the reverse. Someone told Jackqueline Susann that she should write a biograph of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis called “Jackie O by Jackie S.”

Susann wrote the story as fiction and called it “Delores.” But she definteily reserached Onassis’s life to do it.

4

I just (about an hour ago) finished the most recent example of this, American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld. It’s a novel told in the first person by the wife of a Republican president, first elected in 2000, who dealt with a terrorist attack in September of his first year in office, and experiencing plummeting approval ratings before the end of his second term because of a war he’s pursuing in Iraq.

The author makes no pretense that this isn’t all very closely based on the Bushes, despite setting it in Wisconsin, but it ended up being a way better novel than I expected. (Despite the good reviews, which were enough to get me to pick it off the “NYT recommends” table at the library when I saw it, I was expecting a more polemical/sensationalistic work, and not one as well written as this was.)

The First Lady ends up a fairly sympathetic character – a secret liberal, but one who truly loves her husband, a charmer whose ebullience is immensely attractive to her rather repressed self.

To answer the question the OP poses – the book is clearly fictional, including a few incidents/situations that didn’t, AFAIK, come from Laura Bush’s life (an abortion while a teenager; a grandmother who had a long-term intimate friendship with a woman doctor down in Chicago) in addition to some that did (an auto accident – her fault – in which someone died [was that person a high school classmate IRL?]; her husband is part of a group that buys a baseball team, and, an alcoholic, stops drinking through the power of prayer).

5

Beyond his name and the fact that he spent some time in a rehab clinic, I don’t think any part of A Million Little Pieces has ever been verified. Frey actually admitted that the “sequel”, My Friend Leonard was complete fiction.

Fun Fact: A bunch of libraries reclassified A Million Little Pieces as fiction after the details of Frey’s lies came out.

6

With questions like this, my inclination is usully to insist there aren’t clear boundaries. But in this particular case, it looks like I’m sympathetic to Omniscient’s approach. I think fictioniness infects a work–the slightest bit of fiction in a work renders the entire work fictional.

For example, suppose I published something that looked for all the world like the first volume of an encyclopedia–an actual encyclopedia about the actual world. But suppose I put into the article on apples the following sentence: “Apples cure vampirism.”

One might be tempted to treat this sentence not as fictional but simply as false. There can be false statements in a work without that making the work fictional. Presumably there are mistakes of fact even in encyclopedias being published right now. This doesn’t make them fictional, it just makes them wrong.

But the “apples” sentence above looks to me like an example of fiction, not an unsuccessful attempt simply to report the facts. I can argue that it’s fiction, and not false report, in a couple of different ways. For one thing, there’s authorial intent. We can build the example in such a way that it is understood that the author wrote the apples sentence with the intention that the sentence not be an attempt to report a fact but rather with the intention that it be a fictional report about a fictional world. Of course, many people (I am one of them) do not think that authorial intent is particulary authoritative when it comes to the correct interpretation of a text. Given that, the sentence still looks fictional to me. For the coherence of the rest of the encyclopedia volume with the real world seems to presuppose that the text itself accurately tracks the distinction between fiction and reality–and so when it refers to vampires that one time in that one place, the presumption seems to be that this failure to track reality is intentional in the text, and not an accident or a mistake of some kind.

Okay, let’s assume you’re convinced the apples sentence is fictional and not just a false report about the actual world. If that’s the case, then it looks like the whole volume is a work of fiction. Because the apples sentence colors our perception of the entire volume. What might simply have been a report of facts about the world becomes, in light of that single sentence, a report about a fictional world. For the work has the form of an encyclopedia volume, and the convention for such volumes is that all of their entries, and each sentence in those entries, is reporting about how things are in a single world. Since one of those sentences clearly can’t be about the actual world, it seems it is about a fictional world–and that in turn means the whole volume is about a fictional world. That makes the work a fiction.

7

Interestingly, by the way, it may be that my view implies that A Million Little Pieces is non-fiction. For it seems to present itself as a report of facts. That it gets the facts quite wrong doesn’t make it fiction, it just makes it bad non-fiction.

I’d have to read the book itself to be sure it really does self-present as non-fiction, and I have no intention to do that. Some of you may be wondering about books like The Princess Bride which ostensibly present themselves as being true accounts of the actual world, but which are actually fictions–not just false reports, but works of fiction. I’d have to read the book again to find details that give it away as fiction, not bad reporting, but I’m sure the details are there. For one thing, most people come away from the book under no illusion that there’s a real unabridged version of The Princess Bride out there. That would seem to indicate there’s something about the text which successfully tips the reader off that what they’re reading is fiction.

There may be room in this area somewhere for the “not all cases are so clear!” type of argument I’m more used to advocating.

8

A Million Little Pieces uses a stream of consciousness style that removes most punctuation and often discards the idea of sentences as few capital letters are used (except to imply the author is SCREAMING).

It reads like a trashy novel and how it ever passed the smell test as “non-fiction” boggles my mind.

9

The problem is that the line isn’t very well-drawn to start with–even before dishonest asses like Frey screw it up.

My bookstore has fiction and nonfiction sections. What do I do with books that combine a bunch of nonfiction essays with short stories? Answer: it varies on a case-by-case basis. Mostly, I shelve books where people will look for them, not where they “belong.” If an author known mostly for his science fiction writes a book of short stories with a few non-fiction essays in it, I’ll shelve it with his science fiction. Sometimes I make librarians cringe (e.g., shelving Inferno under “D” for Dante when it “belongs” under “A”), but my objective is for people to find what they want.

Here’s another: I write children’s books. They’re educational and factual, but the information is imparted through a fictional setting. Think of a (fiction) story about a family visiting a (real) museum and having the parents teach the kids in a fun way. Mine aren’t set in a museum but you get the idea. My publisher sells them as non-fiction and that’s where libraries usually shelve them, but the family in the books doesn’t exist, so they’re actually fiction.

10

Ahem…

[librarian]Dante’s Inferno goes under Dewey Decimal number 851, Italian literature.[/librarian]

11

Not in a bookstore, it doesn’t. We don’t use Dewey Decimal.

Fiction (including classics) are traditionally alphabetical by last name in bookstores, which is why Inferno belongs under A. But it seems everybody looks under D and if they don’t see it there they assume we don’t have it.

12

Right, I was just saying you’re not going to make a librarian cringe because a classic like Dante’s Inferno would never be in the fiction section to begin with.

And putting it under D wouldn’t bother me, but then I’m one of those new hip librarians.

13

I can see putting “The Divine Comedy” under D rather than A, or a book of poetry by Michaelangelo under M rather than B, because the authors are better known by their first names only. It bothers me when I see Gabriel Garcia Marquez under M, rather than G, even though I know M is where most people would look first.

Another interesting case for the is it fact/fiction is Dutch by Edmund Morris. It is a bio of Ronald Reagan, but the author puts himself in situations where wasn’t even alive yet, IIRC. It was quite controversial at the time of release.

14

I like you new, hip librarians.

I ended up merging my literary fiction and classics sections years ago because everybody seemed to have a different definition of “classic” (my favorite is, if the author’s alive it’s literary fiction and if he’s dead it’s a classic). Sure, some books are obviously classics (Dante, Homer, Twain…), but many others are very confusing.

What finally capped it was a lengthy debate about whether The Invisible Man belonged in science fiction or classics.

15

Three famous movies which come to mind: (1) Citizen Kane, transparently based on William Randolph Hearst; (2) Inherit the Wind, transparently based on the Scopes trial; and (3) Hoosiers, transparently based on the Milan High School team of 1955.

Each is presented as fiction, and the names are changed to protect the guilty. In each case, many aspects of the underlying story are twisted out of recognition for dramatic convenience.

But you have to ask, can the story stand on its own as fiction without the underlying true story? Every time we discuss Citizen Kane, someone will say, well, to udnerstand this movie you have to know about Hearst, who really did run newspapers and cause a war and live on a castle on a mountaintop. Without Hearst, Citizen Kane would seem ridiculous. So it isn’t quite pure fiction either.

Personally, I don’t like hybrids. If you think Hearst or Scopes or Milan are worthy stories to tell, tell them as straight drama and follow the facts as well as you can. If you don’t think they’re worthy, make up your own story using your imagination. But don’t take half of one and half of the other.

16

For the most part, I agree with you, but there’s a reason historical fiction is so popular: we don’t have all the facts. Phrases like “based on our best guess” or “might possibly have” or “is the likeliest scenario” don’t make for compelling storytelling. Making up some plausible dialog in cases where we couldn’t possibly know the real dialog makes things more interesting. Having some fully fleshed-out fictional characters in a non-fiction setting brings it more to life.

There are many places where I’d rather read about fictional characters in real-world settings than in completely made-up worlds.

17

Yes. Even if it can’t, the fiction can be used as commentary. I won’t say that Law & Order offers brilliant fiction, but it twist on the news of the day. There’s nothing invalid about that.

It’s adapted from real life, but I disagree completely that you have to know even one thing about Hearst to understand Citizen Kane. I knew nothing about Hearst when I first saw Citizen Kane and I thought it was amazing. I still don’t know much about him and I’ve seen the movie a handful of times since.
It annoys me when people try to turn Kane into a simple biography of Hearst, because if you see it as a biopic with the names changed, you’ve missed the point. It isn’t, and the adaptation from Hearst’s life is NOT what makes the movie or the story interesting. If Rosebud had a different name, one that did not come from Hearst’s life, it would not change anything important about Citizen Kane.

This is sort of a lazy attitude, and fortunately, it’s one that writers have disregarded throughout history, because using recognizable characters helps tell a story. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible combines real history and fiction in an effort to shed light on the McCarthy hearings, for example. What’s wrong with that? The facts are not always the most interesting story. It’s wrong to represent fiction or invented material as fact, but there’s nothing wrong with combining them.

18

Biographies of Napoleon are almost always under N instead of B as well.

19

Didn’t he drop the “Bonaparte” after becoming emperor and just go by “Emperor Napoleon I”? If that’s true, then they actually belong under N.

20

It isn’t a biopic at all. While the character was clearly inspired by Hearst there were some very major differences (key among them perhaps being that Kane grew up poor and was separated from his parents while Hearst grew up in the lap of luxury and was a total mama’s boy until the day she died), and also Kane dies alone and abandoned having driven everyone away while Hearst and Davies were still very much together when Kane was made and he in fact died in her house. Welles, who never deined Hearst was an inspiration, supposedly would get furious when people referred to it as a “thinly veiled” accounting (though not as mad at being corrected over how to do a pea commercial).

Another biopic that’s not thinly veiled but a flat out “names and all” depiction is A Man for All Seasons. It’s a great play/movie, fantastic and deserving of its awards, but if you tried to write a paper on Thomas More with the info that’s in it you’d fail; he was a far more complex character than his dramatic counterpart (that odd combination of life of the party and religious fanatic who had imposed some suffering on ‘heretics’ when he was in power) plus some very important players (including his son) and events are left out altogether. Likewise Amadeus and Royal Hunt of the Sun by Shaffer- both are great plays, both use the names and life events of historical characters, and both are completely useless as history or biography (which they were never intended to be- they’re both far more parabolic).
The Crucible is far more fiction than fact. For starters the real John Proctor (though he did have a pregnant wife) was about 60 and the real Abigail was about 10, the real Judge Danforth was actually more the voice of reason than he was the hellfire and damnation zealot, and Tituba was an American Indian rather than African.
The progression is interesting from a historical standpoint though. I’d wager that
many revered historical figures- King David, Socrates, Alexander the Great, etc., were about as close in reality to the way they’re perceived today as Thomas More/Mozart/Salieri/Pizarro are to their counterparts in these plays.