Nonfiction… Or is it?

In one of the English courses I’m taking, we frequently discuss creative nonfiction, and what kinds of rules should be imposed on works within the genre, for accuracy’s sake. I had been planning on posting about this for a while, but today the topic came up again in the Shenandoah internship course, and it seemed timely to try to start up a discussion on the subject.

James Frey was mentioned today, and we all know what happened to him when people found out that parts of the autobiographical account of his drug addiction, A Million Little Pieces, were fabricated. He was called out on The Oprah Winfrey Show (here is what amounts to a transcript of that particular interview), lost a publishing deal with Penguin, went through a lawsuit, and readers who’d bought his book before its falsities had been discovered could even receive a refund for their purchase. Frey received an incredible amount of negative press throughout the scandal. I’m sure all kinds of people have written about whether or not all this was deserved. What I’m curious about is what people think of this issue as it applies to creative nonfiction in general, not just this one fairly obvious example.

When someone writes a memoir or a book that they describe as “nonfiction,” is it important that it’s factually accurate, or can the Truth behind the author’s impressions, emotions and memories be more important? If not, should authors have to put a disclaimer in the first few pages? Dave Eggers does so in his A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (also mentioned in class today), as did Norman Mailer in the late ‘60s when he published his account of the 1967 March on the Pentagon in The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History.

I have observed in my nonfiction class that most people, when asked directly, are not willing to come right out and say they are on one side or the other when it comes to fact and truth in creative nonfiction. There seems to be a huge gray area in which we expect creative nonfiction writers to operate. Is it possible to sift through this gray matter and draw a clear verdict on what a nonfiction writer can and cannot do?