Letters to the Editor
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An excuse with feigned humor is still a bullshit excuse.
The subtext of this piece is clear, "what is reality anyway? You could question the truth of many works."
Bullshit. Bringing up the Bible, or a freaking poem by Walt Whitman is just obscuring the open fraud of this recent scandal.
It's not a slippery slope between issues of memory and flat out documented lies, it's a chasm.
There's no equivocation to be made out claiming you ran with the wolves after escaping the warsaw ghetto, or being a white suburbanite making up shit about the inner city.
I'm always amused at this sort of "shades of grey" and "emotional truth" crap coming from people who are most likely outraged at the brazen falsehoods surrounding the Iraq war. Well guess what people - you are engaging in the same justifications and moral evasions of definitions as the Bush administration when you pretend memoir is just another shade of fiction with no journalistic obligations.
I think what motivates those who are so willing to indulge truthiness with quasi-intellectual arguments is a severe discomfort with what these exposures reveal. Especially the intense racism and exploitation in these two recent cases, where white folk felt just fine appropriating the stories of the less fortunate for fame and profit. Or why a white woman could not only get away with lies, but lies which fed white assumptions about the inner city.
I wonder if those defending this example as if it were no different from a faulty memory realize the author set up a fake charity to help sell her book - and has been exposed as having lied about reaching out to the people she claimed were the reason she told those noble lies.
Of course, facing up to this might mean taking responsibility for our own moral boundaries. And high lit types have the privilege of not having to worry about that.