The Lifespan of a Fact [Paperback]

John D'Agata (Author), Jim Fingal (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 27, 2012

Named a top 10 Best Book of 2012 by Slate.com

An innovative essayist and his fact-checker do battle about the use of truth and the definition of nonfiction.

How negotiable is a fact in nonfiction? In 2003, an essay by John D’Agata was rejected by the magazine that commissioned it due to factual inaccuracies. That essay—which eventually became the foundation of D’Agata’s critically acclaimed About a Mountain—was accepted by another magazine, The Believer, but not before they handed it to their own fact-checker, Jim Fingal. What resulted from that assignment was seven years of arguments, negotiations, and revisions as D’Agata and Fingal struggled to navigate the boundaries of literary nonfiction.

This book reproduces D’Agata’s essay, along with D’Agata and Fingal’s extensive correspondence. What emerges is a brilliant and eye-opening meditation on the relationship between “truth” and “accuracy” and a penetrating conversation about whether it is appropriate for a writer to substitute one for the other.

Two-color throughout

Editorial Reviews

Review

“...[H]ere is the genius of this little book, for as it progresses, D'Agata and Fingal turn everything around on us, until even our most basic assumptions are left unclear. Who says writers owe readers anything? Or that genre, such as it is, is a valid lens through which to consider literary work? ...[T]he book is "an enactment of the experience of trying to find meaning"— a vivid and reflective meditation on the nature of nonfiction as literary art.” (David L. Ulin - L.A. Times )

“A fascinating and dramatic power struggle over the intriguing question of what nonfiction should, or can, be.” (Lydia Davis )

“Very à propos in our era of spruced-up autobiography and fabricated reporting, this is a whip-smart, mordantly funny, thought-provoking rumination on journalistic responsibility and literary license.” (Publishers Weekly )

“A singularly important meditation on fact and fiction, the imagination and life, fidelity and freedom. Provocative, maddening, and compulsively readable, The Lifespan of a Fact pulses through a forest of detail to illuminate high-stakes, age-old questions about art and ethics—questions to which the book (blessedly!) provides no easy answers.” (Maggie Nelson )

“...The Lifespan of a Fact... is less a book than a knock-down, drag-out fight between two tenacious combatants, over questions of truth, belief, history, myth, memory and forgetting.” (Jennifer McDonald - New York Times Book Review )

“A riveting essay delving into the arcane yet entertaining debate within the writing community over the relationship between truth and accuracy when writing creative nonfiction....” (Kirkus Reviews )

“...Thus begins the alternately absorbing and infuriating exercise that is the book The Lifespan of a Fact, a Talmudically arranged account of the conflict between Jim Fingal, zealous checker, and John D’Agata, nonfiction fabulist, which began in 2005 and resulted in this collaboration.” (Gideon Lewis-Kraus - New York Times Magazine )

“If you like compelling, emotional stories set in wild, business-friendly locales, this book delivers.” (Daniel Roberts - Fortune Magazine )

About the Author

John D’Agata is the author of About a Mountain, Halls of Fame and editor of The Next American Essay and The Lost Origins of the Essay. He teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, where he lives.

Jim Fingal is now a software engineer and writer in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (February 27, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393340732
• ISBN-13: 978-0393340730
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 0.3 x 9.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #56,853 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #26 in Books > Education & Reference > Writing, Research & Publishing Guides > Writing > Editing

More About the Author

John D'Agata is the author of "Halls of Fame," "About a Mountain," and editor of "The Next American Essay" and "The Lost Origins of the Essay." He teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, where he lives.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 32 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely unique, and very good. February 29, 2012

By Bookety book

Format:Paperback

As usual, a negative reviewer is being disingenuous.

"los casas" is clearly a fan of John D'Agata (check out the comments to his review, where he recommends a D'Agata book) and because D'Agata comes off as a tool and liar in this book, los casas doesn't want you to read it.

In truth, Lifespan of a Fact is a wonderful, unique book. For anyone at all interested in "non-fiction" and the material you read in feature articles, this is an astounding, warts-and-all look at how it happens. Jim Fingal does a yeoman's effort to get the story right and D'Agata seems to want to undermine him at every turn. Some of their exchanges are simply hilarious. Even the ones that are just troubling are instructive. D'Agata is a writer not to be trusted, and Fingal calls him out on it again and again.

But what is best about this book is that it is unlike almost anything else you'll read. I don't know how it was ever published, given how it portrays the sausage-make process of fact checking. But I'm very glad it was.

This book is absolutely one of a kind and ought to be required reading for anyone wanting to write nonfiction.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Thought-provoking...readers should have been in on the gag, but that is the gag March 31, 2012

By Nathan Webster TOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Paperback

There are two ways to review this book: at face value, taking the book at its word; or once you know the entire backstory.

The book has an unconventional structure, with John D'Agata's essay on the page, surrounded by his "conversation" with fact-checker Jim Fingal. Read the essay from start-to-finish first.

Then, once you read the conversation, you will see the factual 'errors' throughout the essay, about a teenager who died after jumping off the Las Vegas Stratosphere tower. These errors would not have jumped out to you before. D'Agata's original narrative is full of detail, description, interviews and quotes, so it seems completely accurate and credible.

In fact, as Fingal discovers, D'Agata has taken numerous liberties with the facts - changing "pink" to "purple" because he wanted the extra "beat" that purple provides. Or by "punching up" various quotes. D'Agata doesn't explicitly change the factual meaning, but he mixes, matches and changes to serve his literary purposes.

Fingal, apparently offended, does yeoman's work to break down every inaccuracy no matter how seemingly insignificant. So if D'Agata says "he walked on a red brick driveway," Fingal checks and says, "the driveway was brown."

At first, a reader might be taken aback by these factual liberties - after all, the original essay was considered nonfiction.

But, D'Agata's position (I wouldn't call it a defense, because he doesn't accept the opposing argument) is that as an 'essayist' he owes the reader an artistic experience, not 100 percent factual accuracy. That his job is to the story, not as a journalist, and that "nonfiction" as a category is a fairly new concept, while "essays" (defined as "an attempt") have been around for hundreds of years.

At that point, his choices become more interesting - the extra syllable in "purple" does help how the narrative sounds on the page. The quotes he changes do read more interestingly. Does it matter that they are not 100 percent true? Isn't the story still being told?

Fingal's fact-checks often seem overblown as well - he will say something should have been "3.5 instead of 3," or that various driving directions are somewhat unlikely. He's right - but what does it matter? His reliance on 100 percent accuracy begins to seem absurd, especially when his wordy or clunky suggestions are compared to D'Agata's sparer prose.

I think the book does what the authors wanted - it raises questions about "nonfiction" and "accuracy" and "art." At first, I was fairly offended by D'Agata's fictional choices, but as I kept reading I began to see the value of what he was doing, and began to tire of Fingal's nitpicking on every specific detail (which is Fingal's point, though).

D'Agata makes a clear distinction between what he's doing and newspaper journalism - where he would also demand reliance on the facts. It's only this creative essay art form, that he thinks liberties are allowed - and necessary.

Then, there's the second way to look at the book...

It's presented as an organic dialogue between the two writers, but much of it was recreated or deliberately written for this book. So the book's entire conceit is a fictional construct. The sometimes aggressive give-and-take between D'Agata and Fingal is not a true dialogue (I have to say I suspected this early on, and when I researched it more, my suspicions were confirmed - I wish I'd read the whole book before doing that. Sorry for the spoiler!).

This is no problem as far as D'Agata goes - it fits perfectly into his artistic expression. But it makes Fingal a hypocrite, because it renders his entire factual defense as a moot point.

That's all very well and good - the conversation is still interesting, but it would have been better if they'd tipped their hand at least a little, to let the reader in on the gag....but that IS the gag, obviously. I began the book questioning D'Agata, but now it's Fingal who I have less regard for.

But...that aside, this is an interesting and thought-provoking book. This raises a lot of questions about ESSAYS versus NONFICTION and what is what. No one could ever excuse a reporter making up or changing facts - but by D'Agata's "essayist as artist" example, an essayist owes the reader a good story, and good artistic experience - period.

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Contrived, Phony, Pretentious, & Wildly Entertaining March 8, 2012

By takingadayoff TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

The pre-publication hype about Lifespan of a Fact prepared me for a smackdown between the heroic fact-checker demanding truth and the artist who values his creative process above mere facts.

Who doesn't value truth, especially in nonfiction? But once I began reading the book, it didn't take long to start seeing essayist D'Agata's side of the story.

It also didn't take too long to start to suspect that the entire book was a set-up.

Co-author Jim Fingal introduces himself as an intern for the magazine that D'Agata has submitted an article to. He has been assigned to fact check the article and takes issue with the first few lines of the essay and D'Agata responds (it is ostensibly an e-mail correspondence) that he doesn't think a fact checker is necessary for his type of writing. Fingal checks with the editor (who remains unnamed) who seems exasperated with Fingal and tells Fingal to correspond with D'Agata directly. The rest of the dialogue is therefore between a supposedly young, inexperienced fact checker and the established writer.

Fingal picks at the essay word by word, and the fact checking quickly becomes a parody, an outrageous exaggeration. At one point, he even fact checks his own comments. He's also oddly sarcastic for an intern who claims to be new at his job. We are also to believe that he didn't read the entire article before he started fact-checking it. Once you read to the end of the article, some of what seem discrepancies are explained. I wondered why D'Agata continued to respond to him after Fingal became excruciatingly nitpicky and snarky. Or why D'Agata didn't contact the editor directly.

But they do continue the exchange, which we are told lasted seven years. For a hundred strangely-formatted pages, the two go back and forth, getting nowhere, at times resorting to playground retorts. "It's called art, [duckhead]." Near the end of the book, the two get into a lengthy conversation about the nature of art and truth. Then they return to slogging it out detail by detail, fact by fact, to the end of the article and the book.

It seems this entire so-called correspondence is another of D'Agata's fictions. It smacks of college dorm conversations about Philosophy 101. It's clever and entertaining, but ultimately, contrived and pretentious. Yes, we get it -- at what point does Truth become Truthiness? When is a Fact an Opinion? Acknowledging the slipperiness of some facts doesn't absolve the writer of either trying to be truthful when writing nonfiction, or at least giving his audience a warning that he intends to create Art or some Greater Truth rather than just the facts.

A few years ago I enjoyed D'Agata's About a Mountain, the book that grew out of the article in question. But I thought I was learning something when I read it, about Yucca Mountain and about nuclear waste and imploding Vegas casinos and the Nevada water supply. I was foolish enough to believe the "facts" set out in the book. Turns out I was being improved with Art and Greater Truths. Oops.