Debra Komar: The trouble with “truthiness” in history

Debra Komar has worked as a forensic anthropologist in the US, UK, and Canada for over 20 years. Her books include The Ballad of Jacob Peck and The Lynching of Peter Wheeler, which has just been published by Goose Lane Editions. She’ll be guest editing The Afterword all this week.

Truthiness is embracing a reality that feels right, rather than one supported by fact. Satirist Stephen Colbert coined the term to describe the media’s politically motivated tendency to rewrite history, but truthiness permeates all aspects of popular culture, including books designated as non-fiction. In a quest to make historical treatises read like novels, the literary world has blurred the line between fact and fiction. A relatively benign example can be found in a pivotal race scene from the bestseller Seabiscuit, in which author Laura Hillenbrand tells us what the horse was thinking. Such narrative devices unquestionably bring the past to life but where is history’s burden of proof, the tangible evidence needed to establish fact in other disciplines like science, medicine or law?

Non-fiction’s descent into truthiness began in 1965 with Truman Capote’s ground-breaking masterpiece, In Cold Blood. The work blended reportage with dramatic constructs, and the result was an entirely new genre: creative non-fiction. Other classics soon followed, including Norman Mailer’s Pulitzer-prize winning “true life novel,” The Executioner’s Song. The genre continues to evolve, but pays homage to its roots. Erik Larson cites In Cold Blood as the prototype for his true crime epic, TheDevil in the White City. In her latest book, The Massey Murder, Charlotte Gray writes, “I imagine, but I do not invent,” drawing the exact same line in the sand as Mailer and his ilk. But here’s the kicker: Capote and Mailer’s works were clearly identified as fiction, while Larson and Gray’s offerings are marketed as history. The product is the same; only the label has changed.

Fifty years ago, publishers were hesitant to label a work as non-fiction when the primary reference material was the author’s imagination. Today, publishing houses have no such qualms, and the result is a generation of editors who vet books with their guts, rather than a fact-checker. The creative non-fiction landscape is littered with the smoldering wreckage of recalled books on Benghazi, fallacious concentration camp romances, and James Frey’s master-class in revisionist history, A Million Little Pieces. Perhaps the best hedge against literary truthiness is to return to the golden rule of the Capote era — if the fact-checking begins and ends with the author, call it what it is: fiction.

What distinguishes Capote, Mailer, Larson and Gray from fabulists like Frey is exhaustive research, but what separates the current crop of non-fictionists from their predecessors is transparency. Neither Mailer nor Capote offered notes or references to corroborate their versions of real-life events. Modern-day balladeers like Gray and Larson anchor their work in the historical archives, meeting the burden of proof with detailed notes and bibliographies, and it is that transparent, research-based model of narrative non-fiction which I choose to build on.

The trouble with truthiness is at the core of my latest book, The Lynching of Peter Wheeler. It paints a less than flattering portrait of the Canadian legal system, but we have to deal with the history we have, rather than the sepia-toned history we want.