David Thayer

Publishing folk are creeping around in their pajamas being extra quiet today. In the middle of the James Frey all nighter someone realized that the music was too loud, that the party had migrated outside, the cops were coming, and worst of all, they woke up Oprah. The loudest bunch were bloggers and no one invited them in the first place; their three a.m. rendition of Uncle John’s Band left all the cats and kittens hugging Budweiser cans and wishing for the good old days when no one cared what they did.

Oprah is not mad! This headline is column inches higher than Jonathan Franzen’s forehead. Sure someone barfed in the sink, left the cake out in the rain, kicked a visiting professor in the shins. As Larry King asked the caller in Fort Lee to speak up, everyone held their breath. Only five percent of the story is fabricated. That’s good, right? Some might wonder if that means that every chapter in the book is five percent untrue or if that’s a floating mean derived from the aggregate of all the stories, some true, some as low as fifty percent accurate. Five percent. Whew. That leaves 950,00 little pieces, which is plenty.

Gay Talese observed that ‘writers must be held accountable.’ Non-fiction takes no liberty with the facts and should not.’ Say it brother.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 12th, 2006 at 6:39 am and is filed under Ripped from Headlines Still Oozing Ink. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.