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/lit/ - Literature

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21800471 No.21800471 [Reply] [Original]

Were both essays only interesting because they were made-up?

>Of course, Wallace, too, wrote autofiction, but it was called journalism. A common reflex among readers is to divide Wallace’s fiction from his nonfiction — to treat them almost as the product of two separate brains. In fact, the projects have a lot of overlap, which has brought its own complications. When D.T. Max revealed in his 2012 biography Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story that some facts were fudged and characters made composite in the famous cruise-ship and Illinois State Fair essays, many said, “Oh, so that’s why they ran in Harper’s rather than The New Yorker. They wouldn’t pass the fact-checkers.” But as Thomas Kunkel’s new biography of Joseph Mitchell has shown, Wallace wasn’t up to anything new or all that criminal — as a nonfiction writer, he wasn’t right for The New Yorker mostly because he wasn’t a creature of anyone’s house style.

>> No.21800615
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21800615

meh

>> No.21800986

>>21800471
The cruise ship story is good, regardless of facts and fudge.

>> No.21801047

>>21800986
I liked it. I thought it was pretty funny.