Shafer had a great piece yesterday on Slate about lying, memory and journalism.
He also linked to a piece in The New Republic about how David Sedaris embellished at best and lied outright at worst in many of his crazy stories:
Even so, in the end, I decided Kid Sedaris probably did volunteer at Dix. Why? Because I called him and asked. He says he did, and I believe him. During a long conversation from his temporary roost in Tokyo–where he has been holed up trying to quit smoking, poor guy–Sedaris was admirably open to fielding my most obnoxious questions about the hard-to-believe things I had found in some of his stories. He admitted that he had pumped up the Dix episode to tell a funnier yarn and that the juicy details with Clarence didn’t take place.
That seems beyond the boundaries of comic exaggeration. It’s fine to use absurdly embellished descriptions for laughs–this is an essential tool for any humorist. If I write, “I was so hungover, I threw up my own skeleton,” you know I’m kidding. It’s not fine to pretend–in a long and detailed scene–that you performed outlandish, dangerous tasks at a mental hospital when you didn’t.
And Sedaris definitely didn’t. When I asked him about his duties at Dix, he said, in that gentle voice so many people know and love, “It would have been more like helping set up parties.” That cleared it up. Everything in Naked was true, except for the parts that weren’t.
This is really disappointing, because I enjoy Sedaris’ work and have a signed copy of one of his works on my bookshelf. But if half of them are fiction? Man, that’s just lame. Dude, just call it fiction.
