Sorry about the long silence, I'm in Florida right now and leave soon for upstate New York. Hopefully I'll be able to keep posting at a reasonable rate.

The current issue of Poets & Writers has a piece by Andrew Furman on "the creative nonfiction crisis". He uses the New Republic article on David Sedaris from last March as a springboard to discuss the nature of truth when writing a memoir or essays. As he explains many of his MFA students found no problem with the fact that Sedaris might have made up dialogue and events in his work and still passed them off as nonfiction. In the wake of James Frey, JT LeRoy and Nasdiij we all seem to be expecting less from this type of writing, except for one of Furman's students who gets to the point rather directly:

"I don't know why we're making excuses for this guy," one of my students declared, nonplussed. (I would learn only later that this student had been working feverishly on a memoir of his brutal childhood.) "He made things up," the student continued, slowly, accenting each monosyllable with the blade of his hand against the seminar table before him.

It occurred to me at that moment that I might have responded to that Sedaris story in precisely this manner had it come to light a year or so earlier, before the onslaught of the aforementioned scandals. Since then, the majority of this student's peers - and even his professor - had likely grown inured to all but the most egregious cases of authorial fraud, and this was wrong.

This whole notion of truth in writing nonfiction is a big deal to me, and even though I'm an enormous fan of Tim O'Brien's work, I've been very careful to navigate my way through Map as honestly and accurately as possible. I think that O'Brien did a good job of writing his memoir honestly, and even in The Things They Carried, which is labeled literature, he makes a point of writing a fictional account of one soldier's homecoming and then following it with an essay of the truth about that same soldier. It's an interesting line that he walks and I think it can rarely be done successfully - and by that I mean telling the truth wjhen writing any kind of nonfiction.

But here's the thing - I don't remember it all and that makes writing about it pretty damn hard.

I do remember all the people, all the accidents, all the highs and lows that I found everyday on the job. But can I tell you what we said and be 100% accurate? No way. It was ten years ago and no one can remember everything they said and did from back then. Some things I am certain about (you never forget when a fed tells you that without a plane load of passengers killed in a crash, they are just dealing with "one more dead pilot"), but when I write about how I made certain decisions or handled different situations, I am writing what we might have said or likely said. And maybe even what I wish we said - but then I write that those conversations are wishful thinking on my part so the reader can see how I feel now as opposed to then.

It's easy to get lost in all this remembering. And easier still to think of how much better it might read if I could make the book that much more dramatic. Do you sacrifice drama when you go after truth? Maybe - I'm really not sure. But it seems like you can find enough drama in daily life if you frame it in the right circumstance; if you make the people involved real enough for the reader to care. I'm tempted to write a chapter on the flying story I wish I could tell, and then write how it really was. Busting a myth or two would be better I think, then merely telling them again. But the truth is that the first dead pilot I encountered in a Alaska was a boy I never met, at an airline down the road, who flew in to a mountain because he was sent on a flight he wasn't ready for. And we didn't spend more than five minutes thinking about him or caring about him or wondering about his family. Mostly we said he was careless and his bosses stupid. And then we went back to work.

I could write twenty pages worth of tears, but those five minutes are only five paragraphs at best. But maybe that is the truth that would tell the crash best - here is the story I could tell, but it's not what happened. Here's how it really was, but you don't want to read this.

Does it take lying to keep readers entralled? As a reader I have no idea and as a writer I'm mildly terrified at the prospect of doing this whole thing right. Being true to who we were, what we did, why we did it; none of that is hard. Being true to myself is the tough part; from the first day on the job at the Company, I always thought lying was easier.

And still, I'm not sure I'm wrong about that.