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Published Letters: 1
With all the recent hubbub over the exaggerations in James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces and the true identity of JT Leroy, people seem to have forgotten that faking it is an artistic tradition.
The current political climate has spawned a new national past-time: fact-checking. And this thirst is no longer satisfied with plethora of pseudo-journalistic accounts of public events—the fact-checkers have resorted to plying their trade on personal accounts.
Just a few years ago, some young film-makers claimed their movie was merely edited together from found footage. There was no public outcry that we were being duped, and the interestingly-crafted-but-boring Blair Witch Project became one of the most profitable movies in history.
Many famous memoirs have been full of exaggerations, those of Salvador Dali and Giacomo Casanova among them, but this is what made them such famous characters. Has anyone dismissed Dali’s painting The Persistence of Memory as artistic hackery because he claims to have bitten the head off of a live bat? Is Casanova’s twelve-volume account of eighteenth century Italian life any less fascinating due to some of his more specious claims to affairs and getaways?
Even Andy Warhol, in his "documentary novel" A (transcribed from twenty-four hours of audio tape made during conversations at the Factory), changed words here and there, though he never indicated which ones he changed.
This is not why Valerie Solanas shot him.
