Creative Nonfiction - Ethics

Ethics

Writers of creative or narrative non-fiction often discuss the level, and limits, of creative invention in their works, and justify the approaches they have taken to relating true events. Melanie McGrath, whose book Silvertown, an account of her grandmother’s life, is "written in a novelist’s idiom", writes in the follow-up, Hopping, that the known facts of her stories are "the canvas on to which I have embroidered. Some of the facts have slipped through the holes – we no longer know them nor have any means of verifying them – and in these cases I have reimagined scenes or reconstructed events in a way I believe reflects the essence of the scene or the event in the minds and hearts of the people who lived through it. To my mind this literary tinkering does not alter the more profound truth of the story." Duncan Barrett and Nuala Calvi, authors of The Sugar Girls, a novelistic story based on interviews with former sugar-factory workers, make a similar point: "Although we have tried to remain faithful to what our interviewees have told us, at a distance of over half a century many memories are understandably incomplete, and where necessary we have used our own research, and our imaginations, to fill in the gaps. However, the essence of the stories related here is true, as they were told to us by those who experienced them at first hand."

In recent years, there have been several well-publicized incidents of memoir writers who exaggerated or fabricated certain facts in their work. For example:

• In 1998, Swiss writer and journalist Daniel Ganzfried revealed that Binjamin Wilkomirski's memoir Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood detailing his experiences as a child survivor of the Holocaust, contained factual inaccuracies.

• The James Frey controversy hit in 2006, when The Smoking Gun website revealed that Frey's memoir, A Million Little Pieces, contained experiences that turned out to be fabrications.

• In 2008, the New York Times featured an article about the memoirist Margaret Seltzer, whose pen name is Margaret B. Jones. Her publisher Riverhead Books canceled the publication of Seltzer's book, Love and Consequences, when it was revealed that Seltzer's story of her alleged experiences growing up as a half-white, half-Native American foster child and Bloods gang member in South Central Los Angeles were fictitious.

Although there have been instances of traditional and literary journalists falsifying their stories, the ethics applied to creative nonfiction are the same as those that apply to journalism. The truth is meant to be upheld, just told in a literary fashion. Essayist John D'Agata explores the issue in his 2012 book Lifespan of a Fact.