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David Sedaris and His DefendersI guess it all comes down to what your definition of "exaggeration" is.

By Jack Shafer
Posted Wednesday, April 11, 2007, at 7:03 PM ET
David Sedaris. Click image to expand.

When Alex Heard tenderly busted David Sedaris in the New Republic last month for adulterating his nonfiction with many imagined settings, scenes, and dialogue, I expected journalists and others to rebuke the best-selling humorist. As for Sedaris, I expected him to acknowledge that he had erred by making up stuff, but those days were behind him.

I was wrong.

Instead, Sedaris found many allies in the press. The Washington Post's Peter Carlson called the New Republic piece "truly ridiculous," and suggested that Heard launch similar investigations into the works of James Thurber, Mark Twain, and Bill Cosby. "Exaggeration and embellishment are what allow humor to suggest larger truths," wrote J. Peder Zane in the Raleigh News & Observer. Columnist Jon Carroll agreed in the San Francisco Chronicle: "A humorist has lots of latitude because funny things don't usually write funny." Writing in his Webzine, RU Sirius, who mistakenly identified Tad Friend as the author of the Sedaris piece, warned against "judging creative, funny storytellers by the strict standards we should apply to politicians."

Sedaris, for one, exhibited no regrets in his discussion with a Newsday reporter at the end of March. "I still stand by what I wrote," he said. He dismisses Heard without disputing so much as one of the article's findings, saying, "I'm probably lucky the person who wrote it is so incompetent."

Sedaris and company want to erect a penumbra that shields humorists from criticism when they blend fiction into their nonfiction but still insist on calling it nonfiction. The logic behind this is difficult to follow. If writing fiction is the license Sedaris and other nonfiction humorists need to get at "larger truths," why limit this exemption to humorists? Let reporters covering city hall, war, and business to embellish and exaggerate so they can capture "larger truths," too. I'm sure that Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, Christopher Newton, and Slate's "monkeyfishing guy" would back this idea, especially if applied retroactively.

Jon Carroll thinks humorists require "latitude" to make things funny, a notion I find bogus. I find stories that are absolutely true—like the time one of my neighbors, dressed up to party on Saturday night, fell into a 55-gallon drum filled with human excrement and urine—the funniest.

In one of the most sensible pieces yet published about the Sedaris affair, San Francisco Chronicle book editor Oscar Villalon offered that Steve Martin and Woody Allen find a way to be funny while working under the fiction label. He seemed to be implying that if Sedaris wants to use his full-blown imagination on making people laugh, he should go ahead and do it.

So, why has Sedaris added fiction to so much of his nonfiction? Villalon asserts that 1) nonfiction sells better than fiction and 2) believable fiction—never mind funny fiction—is incredibly difficult to pull off. The easiest way out for a writer is to spice his nonfiction with just a little fiction to sharpen the story and make it more entertaining. This appears to be Sedaris' method. As Heard's piece explains—some of Sedaris' pieces aren't funny unless leavened with fiction, notably "Giant Dream, Midget Abilities" and "Go Carolina" from Me Talk Pretty One Day. Writes Heard, "Indeed, if Sedaris hadn't made up significant events and dialogue in these pieces, he wouldn't have had 'nonfiction' stories to tell."

I took seriously Peter Carlson's sarcastic suggestion that Heard next investigate the work of Thurber, Twain, and Cosby for evidence that they made up stuff by looking into Thurber's work. After a little puttering around in Nexis, I confirmed that members of his family objected to the treatment they received in the nonfiction pieces he wrote about them for The New Yorker in the early 1950s. Oblivious to the "latitude" humorists require or the "larger truths" they hunt, Thurber's kin protested. Before the pieces were incorporated into 1952's The Thurber Album, the humorist pacified his family with changes, writes Robert Gottlieb in a Sept. 8, 2003, New Yorker essay.

Sedaris has long insisted that his nonfiction stories are both true and exaggerated, which when you think about it is impossible. But you've got to give him credit for choosing the word "exaggerated"—it gives a writer all the indemnification he needs against charges that he's fabricated. Made-up dialogue? It's an exaggeration. A made-up scene? It's just an embellishment. An altered setting? Hyperbole!

Sedaris may be leading in the war of words today, but his real test has yet to come. Most of the pieces cited by Heard come from an earlier part of Sedaris' career, before he was such a regular contributor to The New Yorker, which fact-checks even conjunctions, articles, and prepositions. If "exaggerating" is as innocent as he makes it out to be, he'll eventually revert to the practice because, as he avers, there's nothing wrong with it. But if all of his future pieces are 100 percent verifiable, we'll know where he really stands.

Addendum, 10 p.m.: Daniel Radosh works the Rodney Rothman angle to good effect.

******

From bad times come good stories. I think it was Michael Dolan. Can you find an earlier citation? Disclosure: Alex Heard is a friend. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)

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Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.
Photograph of David Sedaris by Ralph Orlowski/Getty Images.
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Remarks from the Fray:

How pedantic can one get? It is nearly impossible to write a sustained non fiction work which doesn't contain elements of fiction. Do you seriously believe all the political biographies being published?

Does it really require an explanation why we should not "let reporters covering city hall, war, and business to embellish and exaggerate so they can capture 'larger truths,' too?" Do you think we haven't been subject to just that in, say, the lead up to the Iraq war? Who has Sedaris caused to be invaded and killed?

I guess I can't expect much insight or sense of humor in someone who writes" I find stories that are absolutely true—like the time one of my neighbors, dressed up to party on Saturday night, fell into a 55-gallon drum filled with human excrement and urine—the funniest." Well maybe it would sound funnier to me if he embellished it a little.

--mark14

(To reply, click here.)

I'm in a very mildly privileged position in this argument. I grew up in Raleigh only a few blocks away from the Sedaris household, he's a few years older than I am, but our families knew each other - in fact, the way I learned about the publication of "Naked" was when my mother said to me "Lou Sedaris' kid wrote a book, why can't you write a book?" – so, I can vouch that the characters and places in the Raleigh stories all pretty much existed. Sedaris has exaggerated some - for example, the guy who ran the guitar shop wasn't an actual midget, but he was really short.

But I find that I don't really care. In fact, Sedaris' writing is so much more vivid than my own memories, that his stories in some cases have come to overwrite my own memories of the same people and the same places. His version is just better than mine, so why not remember things the Sedaris way?

What's slightly depressing about all of this is that it's another instance of the fading of the humanist perspective from public thought. The simple realization hat an idea can speak to some truth about the experience of being human without being literally true seems to be wasting away from our public consciousness. If something can't be true and not true at the same time, then where does that leave literature?

--ophymirage

(To reply, click here.)

You know, when I was a kid at summer camp someone told me the "completely true story" of the hook-handed killer who was on the loose, and some teenagers were making out in the car and then heard some scratching noises and drove off really fast and when they got home a hook was hanging off of the door handle! Jack Shafer and his buddy Alex Heard better get on the ball investigating whether that really happened, b/c I'm sure we'd all be destroyed to learn that that was just a made-up ghost story!

Honestly, I just don't get it. I don't get it. 2 stories in 3 weeks about this? Comparing David Sedaris to Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair? The man is a humorist! Seriously! Regardless if he said they were true or not, his stories were never considered journalism. So why should I hold a humorist to the same standards that I hold a journalist? Why is it unreasonable to suggest that a humorist be held to the same standards as say, a comedian rather than a journalist?

--MDUpstateNY

(To reply, click here.)

This piece is satire, right? […] If we boldly assume for a moment that Shafer intends for us to read his piece straight, we're forced to conclude that Sedaris's real crime is to write in a way that doesn't fit neatly into the literary categories he has in his mind.

This is the hallmark of great writing, after all: the ease with which the Borders clerk can find a proper spot to shelve it.

Shafer can't be serious, though. How long has it been since someone believed that any literary representation of past events can be a perfect, unadulterated copy of lived experience? What is the difference, other than a matter of degree, between David McCullough using an adjective that can never be fully justified to describe a certain tone in a letter of John Adams, and Sedaris changing names and chronologies, or making one character out of two people?

The key here is a misunderstanding about nonfiction in general, which centers on the hard-dying belief that there are writers out there who are completely objective, and who play no creative or editorial role in reporting the subjects about which they write. The memoir writer, like the historian, uses the inherited detritus of past (memory, in the case of the former, and letters, pictures, diaries, and the like for the latter) to construct a narrative that works to create some greater understanding of the past and human existence. But at every stage they hone, shape, and massage the material in order to better convey their argument.

Unlike the practicing historian, however, the memoirist has no compunction to get nearly every detail of chronology and attribution factually correct and precise. It would be ludicrous to read an autobiography with exhaustive footnotes.

We expect instead from writers like Sedaris that they tell us the truth about their lives and that they make us laugh. I find myself wondering whether Shafer would have a problem at all if Sedaris adopted the term "creative nonfiction," now in vogue at creative writing programs across the country, to describe his work. What if he puckishly had his publisher print the words "Pet Care" on the upper left-hand corner of the back of his dust jackets? How long would it take any reader to realize what he was reading?

Maybe they wouldn't sue. Maybe they'd be too busy laughing.

--thebargeron

(To reply, click here.)

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