When Stories Read A Little Too Good

Jack Shafer writes on Slate:

Another public storyteller whose personal recollections don’t jibe with reality is David Sedaris. Alex Heard’s examination of Sedaris’ nonfiction in the March 19 New Republic reveals the humorist taking broad and routine liberties with the facts in pursuit of laughs.Sedaris’ stories derive their punch from the fact that they’re supposed to be true, a standard he embraces in the introduction to his 1997 collection Naked. "The events described in these stories are real," Sedaris writes. Even so, nobody expects a humorist to apply the absolute faithfulness to characters, dialogue, and events in his stories that an AP reporter brings to a congressional-hearing dispatch. No scold, Heard bends like a contortionist to accommodate Sedaris, writing that it’s OK for a "humorist to recreate dialogue that captures the general spirit of how a conversation unfolded." But this artistic license doesn’t give humorists the right to remember their stories more vividly than they actually happened and still call them real. If humorists pipe lines of dialogue like a playwright (as we now know Sedaris does) or remold scenes from life like a novelist (as we also know he does), they’re basically writing fiction and should cop to it. If we label Sedaris’ pieces fiction, are they as hilarious? I think not, and I think Sedaris knows that, and I think that’s why he presents them as nonfiction.