This month, Harper’s Magazine excerpted a portion of The Lifespan of a Fact, a book reproducing email debates between John D’Agata and Believer fact-checker Jim Fingal.
As Fingal struggled to fact-check D’Agata’s “What Happens There” essay for The Believer, the author made passionate arguments about the nature of facts in essays. What do you think–should essay writers be able conflate events or conduct casual interviews?
Here is one argument from D’Agata: “I don’t think readers will care whether the events that I’m discussing happened on the same day, a few days apart, or a few months apart. What most readers will care about, I think, is the meaning that’s suggested in the confluence of these events—no matter how far apart they occurred. The facts that are being employed here aren’t meant to function baldly as ‘facts.’ Nobody is going to read this, in other words, in order to get a survey of the demographics of Las Vegas or what’s scheduled on the community calendar. Readers can get that kind of information elsewhere.”
Full Disclosure: This GalleyCat editor has been fact-checked by The Believer.