The crazy font was annoying to read although I can understand why someone thought it might be a good idea - performance reading concept? Not sure. Relevant for understanding how a story can be approached and rewritten by assumptions, desired response/outcome, editorial pressures. Overall worth reading if you can get beyond the font. ( )

The majority of this book is composed of high spirited banter and a recital of the distance between D'Agata's prose and the facts. The meat of it comes in a one-two punch at the end: the issues regarding a definition of nonfiction come to a head in a conversation between the author and fact-checker that goes beyond particulars, and then Fingal ends with the only twist, in retrospect, that this text could have. I appreciated the layout, especially, which provided a pragmatic alternative to footnotes and a couple of interesting comparisons with medieval biblical manuscripts: both the formatting of original text centered in each page and the use of red ink as accent. Surely no other text is as relevant in comparison when considering our cultural understanding of truth. ( )

The four star rating is for the discussion rather than the written content. The debate was interesting, but having worked for a newspaper I'm not sure that making things up is a great approach. ( )

In recent years, there have been a number of scandals involving news agencies and their staff fudging or adjusting reports or manipulating photographs in order to present a story more dramatically or in a way that will increase the attention-grabbing factor. And in the age of the Internet, almost anything can, and will, be checked against the sources (whether those are reliable sources or not). In this short book, John D’Agata, author of an essay and Jim Fingal, a doggedly determined fact-checker, debate, argue, and yes, fight, over truth versus accuracy, and whether the form of essay-writing should be held to higher journalistic standards.

The design of the text itself is rather confusing at first, as the body of the essay is printed in the center of each page, with the fact-checker’s commentary and dialogue with the author printed footnote-style around the borders of the page. It’s a little difficult to read straight through, but this isn’t the kind of book that you’d want to just read flat out anyway. The fact-checker is extremely thorough, to the point of nitpicking, and though I wholeheartedly support his efforts, I do feel for the author, whose irritation with the whole process shows through.

The back cover of this books reads, [this] “is a brilliant ad 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.” This is an extremely high-blown and overly wordy way of saying, “here is a writer and a fact-checker arguing over their work;” as a librarian and an employee of a community college where we struggle daily to introduce the concept of information literacy to our students, I lean strongly towards the case of the fact-checker, whose attempts to track down and cite the references of the author are often futile. However, I wouldn’t put this book on any must-read lists, simply because the dialogue between the two tends to drag on and even becomes disillusioning after a while. ( )

Did John D'Agata plan this all along?

He's an awareness-raiser for the essay, and an envelope-pusher when it comes to genre. Was the making of this book just a 7-year plot to lean against the edges of what we expect an essay to be?

Here's what happened: D'Agata submitted a piece to The Believer for publication, a piece which was, ostensibly, a true account of the suicide of a Las Vegas teen. The article-essay also included D'Agata's own personal experience of the chain of events and explored the nature of our ideas about Las Vegas. But when fact-checking intern Jim Fingal got a hold of the piece, he quickly realized that it was riddled with factual inaccuracies - nearly all purposeful. ("I needed two beats there," John says to explain why he changed pink vans to purple vans; but much of his fact-massaging was significantly more...significant.)

Each page shows a section of D'Agata's work in the center with Fingal's fact-checking notes - and their correspondence - around the margins. As D'Agata responds with caustic snark and bluntly refuses to change anything, Fingal gets more nit-picky and obnoxious (at one point requesting D'Agata's mother's phone number so he can confirm that she has a cat, which D'Agata had mentioned in passing).

I predict readers will end up choosing sides - and I expect most will side with Fingal. Although a bit of a tedious read, the book was still funny and made somewhat of a comment on the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, Truth and truth. ( )

Exactly what I hoped and dreamed the writer-fact checker relationship would be: passionate, specific, articulate combat, phrase by phrase. Anyone interested in writing should read this book (essay and non-fiction fans surely don't need my advice for this). Worth it for the formatting alone. ( )

This book is now the basis of a play by the same name starring Daniel Radcliffe as Jim Fingal, Bobby Cannavale as John D'Agata, and Cherry Jones as a veteran magazine editor refereeing between them. A friend of mine saw the play before it opened and enjoyed it immensely, which is how I came to read the book. It also got a good review in the Washington Post, a slightly less good satiric review in the New York Times that nonetheless recommended it as a good time.

One thing that is missing from this book is the version of the essay that the Believer actually published, July 1st, 2010, entitled "What Happens There," what happens there. It is online: Reading reviews of this book, I learned that the conversation is a "reconstruction" of their disputes, and that actually, while it took seven-years to publish the essay, the fact-checking that contained in this book was finished in about a year. D'Agata then suggested to Fingal that they make a book out of it. " 'The piece itself is similar to John’s essays in that it’s based on exchanges that actually happened but streamlines and embellishes a bit to get at the core of what is being expressed,' says Fingal. [. . .] In a similar vein, the two writers debated thehttps://believermag.com/what-happens-there/

Throughout the book, I was on Fingal's side. He was doing his job of carefully combing through the essay and checking facts. In the end, D'Agata seems to me to be arguing with the wrong person. The essay has already been rejected by one magazine for factual errors, why is he surprised? Shouldn't he have taken this up with the editor, who presumably made the final decision? The stupid thing is, essays can be many things. I think most of us know that, but as Fingal argues, if the essay is presented as nonfiction, there is an implied contract with the reader. No-one requires D'Agata to write a nonfiction essay about Levi Presley's death, just don't write something fictitious and present it as fact. Why is he so perverse as to insist upon doing that? Perhaps he could have come up with some artistic way of saying that it's based on a true event, but not literally accurate, or that it's his meditation upon the event.. Authors, though usually in books, I think, often explain that they have changed names, or are relying on their memories of events that happened decades before, or have used composites of people. Which I add, he should have done in this essay. But D'Agata keeps unilaterally setting the "rules" of essays.

Most of D'Agata's errors strike me as silly or sloppy, and I fail to see how they make the article more artistic. I see why he wants to stick to 9 seconds, but I don't think it actually adds to essay, since it is apparently related to introducing a meaningless list of things relating to "9." Why does he argue so about small things, or is he just too full of himself? He also tries one of my pet peeves: "the 27 Inuit words for snow" (the numbers of words vary enormously), and this means that they makes distinctions that we don't which reflect their environment. The Inuit, for example, supposedly have a single word meaning "wet snow." I find it difficult to imagine what it matters that they use one word and we use a short phrase -- we obviously both understand the concept. D'Agata does this by claiming that various languages have no word for suicide; as Fingal points out, they use a short phrase, but obviously they understand the concept. D'Agato is completely failing to make any meaningful point. I think he's a vain, pompous, artiste. I think he would have done better, when Fingal turns up inconsistencies in the official reports to use that as a meditation on truth and reliability, if that is actually what he's concerned about.

[Fact check; "The fact is that 'nonfiction' was first widely used in literary circles only fifty or sixty years ago. It was introduced to describe the work that was being done in "New Journalism" in the 1960s qnd 1970s. So our use of it is very new." (D'Agata)

According to Merriam-Webster, the first recorded use of "nonfiction" was in 1867, about a century before D'Agata says.}

What is more serious is that he states undocumented things as facts without saying that this is from casual conversations with witnesses that he didn't bother to document. I began to suspect that the "witness" was in his mirror, as he admitted in a few cases . He often doesn't have notes. I can understand not wanting to whip out a notepad or a tape recorder in all cases, but he could have written his notes when he got home. He also misdates or changes things that could easily be checked or would be obvious to Las Vegans, for some dubious effect. If not Fingal, someone would have likely pointed out that the lap dance ban wasn't in effect, or that another suicide that day jumped like Levi Presley, rather than hanging himself as D'Agata reports. The back cover of the book says that it is a debate between truth and accuracy, but I don't see how his errors made the story any more "truthful." D'Agata throws out a lot of cliches about truth and artistry without convincing me that these things are illustrated by this essay.

There are times when Fingal seems a bit picky; when D'Agata says that the Stratosphere is a quarter of a mile high, and it's approximately two hundred feet short of that (1148 feet vs. 1320 feet), I would agree that saying it's 0.217th of a mile is awkward. Is there some problem with saying that something is "almost," or "approximately" to smooth these situations out?

Many of these problems could also have been avoided if D'Agata wasn't so fond of detailed lists of "facts." Frankly his writing style bores me. In his wonderful essay, "A Reader's Manifesto : An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness of Literary Prose," (Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2001). B. R. Myers says. "Many novels intimidate readers by making them wonder not what the writer is saying but why he is saying it" with paragraph length lists of trivia. I don't care if there was a lap-dancing ban, or what roads Levi drove on, or an account of all elevators, sales girls, souvenirs, advertisements, and ticket vendors that Levi passed on his way up to the open viewing deck. Less would have been more. All this "local color" does not add to my appreciation of the incident. As Fingal noted, the important thing is that Levi Presley is dead. Why on earth did anyone spend seven years on this piece?

If nothing else, at least I know not to waste any time reading John D'Agato.

I anyone is inclined to tell me that I need to read more of his work before making any decisions, I will point out that if I read a book day for a hundred years, I would have read less than 0.1% of the Library of Congress's collection of printed items -- so I spend most of my time on things that I expect to enjoy or find enlightening. ( )

Is accuracy important when trying to tell a story? I found this book delightful, interweaving the comments of the article's author, editor and fact checker. The author chooses to use facts based solely on the truthiness (a la Stephen Colbert) of the information. The fact checker battles against this by researching each line of the article to impressive depth. When he is able to confirm something, the passage is printed in black. The passages printed in red are the "facts" that cannot be proven or are outright wrong. There are far more red passages than black. It is interesting to see the author struggle to produce an article that is captivating and interesting, while the fact checker tries to keep him from outright lying for artistic effect. The snark in some of the exchanges between author and fact checker made this highly enjoyable. ( )

“In 2003, an essay by John D’Agata was rejected by the magazine that commissioned it due to factual inaccuracies. That essay (. . .) was accepted by another magazine, but not before they handed it to their own fact-checker, Jim Fingal. (. . .) What emerges [from the correspondence between the two men] is a brilliant and eye-opening meditation on the relationship between ‘truth’ and ‘accuracy’(.)” The book is presented in the form of emails between D’Agata and Fingal. Both men ‘push the envelope’ to make points that contribute to the overall premise of the book: just how negotiable is a fact in non-fiction?

When I read excerpts to my daughter, who has worked in non-fiction publishing, she was of the opinion that she would have ‘thrown the book across the room’, but I found it fascinating.

I won this from Katie at Doing Dewy in May’s Non-Fiction Blog Hop Giveaway.

Read this if: you enjoy reading essays; or you’ve wondered just how much fiction is in non-fiction. 4 stars ( )

This book was a brief, inventive look at the issues surrounding accuracy, representation, and truth in nonfiction. It reproduces an essay by John D'Agata with the comments by his fact-checker, Jim Fingal, and chronicles their resulting conversation about whether D'Agata's liberties with truth are acceptable. It's a pretty lightweight book but is definitely thought-provoking, great for a book club or a high school classroom.

D'Agata is an essayist who doesn't identify as a journalist. He doesn't invent his stories, but he happily distorts and misrepresents reality in order to achieve an aesthetic effect. Fingal is a fact-checker who, well, checks facts. I found it easy to write off D'Agata as lazy and Fingal as overzealous, but they did both present interesting arguments about their approach to "truth."

Now, I lean pretty heavily on the side of fact-checking. Truth may just be a construct, but that doesn't mean that distortions are okay. They don't come from the ether. Distortions emerge from factors such as carelessness (often trivial to fix), popular imagination (interesting to put into perspective), or cultural bias (important to counter). When Mike Daisey claims that Chinese sweatshop security guards carry guns, he's not just being inventive, he's dismissing the reality of Chinese experience in favor of Hollywood melodrama.

I'd also like to really take issue with the suggestion that nonfiction which distorts the truth becomes fiction. No, good writers of fiction fact check too! We fact check in order to be respectful and believable and to couch our narrative lies in truth.

But D'Agata is right that factual accuracy is not the objective of art. Is cherry-picking facts in order to create an aesthetic mood the same as lying? Not exactly. And cherry-picking is what storytelling, what any argument does - selecting facts and arranging them. Storytelling doesn't and can't reproduce reality in its entirety.

Personally, I like the idea of the Brechtian essayist who doesn't try to control the reader's experience and admits on the page that he's used a story because it sounds good. There's something silver-tongued and deceptive, stereotypically (if not essentially) authorial about D'Agata's defense of his writing style. Can't good art have footnotes? ( )

Warning: if you're anything at all like me, reading The Lifespan of a Factby John D'Agata and Jim Fingal (Knopf, 2012) is very likely to cause a major spike in your blood pressure.

This slim book presents an essay by D'Agata (published in the January 2010 issue of The Believeras "What Happens There"), alongside a series of emails between D'Agata and Fingal, who was assigned to fact-check the article prior to publication. The article concerns the suicide of 16-year-old Levi Presley, who jumped from the tower of the Stratosphere Hotel and Casino on 13 July 2002.

From literally the very first clause, Fingal found difficulties. D'Agata's scene-setting first paragraph contained at least eight statements that either couldn't be proven or were factually inaccurate, so Fingal began emailing D'Agata to try and make corrections. And things quickly turned ugly. D'Agata's responses to Fingal's (entirely fair) questions ranged from the snide to the sarcastic to the downright nasty. The author repeatedly maintained that he was perfectly justified in changing facts to suit his purposes for any reason whatsoever: switching the name of a bar from the Boston Saloon to the Bucket of Blood because the latter "is more interesting"; switching another suicide by jumping on the day of Presley's death to one by hanging because "I wanted Levi's death to be the only one from falling that day. I wanted his death to be more unique." You get the idea. This goes on for 123 pages, with Fingal probing for the facts, and D'Agata arguing that he could, and did, change them whenever he felt like it.

One exchange, from the last section of the piece, should give the flavor. Fingal asks D'Agata where he got information on the specific parking space Presley used the night of his death:

D'Agata: "Your nitpicking is absurd and its ruining this essay. So, as I've said, I'm not participating. Good luck."

Fingal: "In other words, you're taking your ball and going home. Very mature. You know, confirming factual details so that a piece like this has some semblance of accuracy isn't 'nitpicking,' and I think most readers would agree with me. This process is actually meant to help enhance your writing. But I can't imagine you could appreciate anything that would require you to alter your precious words, which no doubt fell into the world from your pen fully formed and immaculate."

D'Agata: "Yeah, I'm the immature one."

One can hardly blame Fingal for getting a bit snarky; I'm amazed at how long he held back.

The main thrust of D'Agata's argument throughout is that he's writing an "essay," not "journalism." This, he maintains, gives him the right to pretty much do whatever he wants. I'm not buyin' it. If you want to write an essay and smooth out some rough spots by changing a few facts here and there, you ought to tell your reader that up front. That's no big deal; easily done, and it hurts no one. D'Agata would disagree, but who's surprised at that?

The book is not enjoyable to read: it's stressful, and unpleasant, to see the abuse DAgata flings at Fingal, and to see the ridiculous excuses he comes up with for the factual misstatements he includes in the piece. That said, it's also a really fascinating look inside the fact-checking process, and I know I certainly won't read certain pieces of writing the same way again. Being published as it was right around the whole Mike Daisey kerfuffle, the book has a certain timeliness to it; I hope that it's widely read.

There are, however, some real missed opportunities. The book doesn't include any contextualization of the situation at all: mentioned only in passing (on the back cover) was that D'Agata's essay had previously been rejected by the magazine (Harper's) that originally commissioned the piece. Just a few of Fingal's interactions with editors about his exchanges with D'Agata are included, so it's difficult to get an overall sense of the process. Most notably, though, the book concludes at the end of the original draft text of the essay ... we don't get a chance to see what happened next in order to get the piece through to publishable form (presumably a whole lot of back-and-forthing with editors, I imagine). The Lifespan of a Fact doesn't include the final text of the essay as published - for that I ordered up a copy of the magazine where it appeared, because I really wanted to see how the battle ended up playing out.

As it turns out, much to my happiness, many (but not all) of Fingal's substantive issues with various elements of the essay are clarified or corrected in the final version. A couple amusing (or not) exceptions I found are cases where both Fingal and D'Agata agreethat D'Agata had made a mistake, but the errors remain in the article. That said, D'Agata's penchant for changing the names of businesses was allowed, as were a few other liberties and several outright factual misstatements.

I certainly came away from this book with a great appreciation for the fact-checkers of the world ...

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2012/05/book-review-lifespan-of-fact.html ( )

The recent hullabaloo over Mike Daisey’s twisting of certain facts in his one-man show, The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, has brought to attention an old debate over duties of authorship and essentially considering the rules for what is considered fiction vs. non fiction? Do people who shun the title of journalist in their work yet publish pieces surrounding true events have obligations to their audience who, given the fact that they’re clearly not reading fiction, purport such articles to be taken at face value as plain fact? At the center of the debate is an argument over integrity: is it better to stay factually honest or go for bridging a larger emotional response sure to capture a larger audience? Do certain authors get a pass just because human rights are involved?

Daisey, for all intents and purposes, doesn’t appear to be in it for the money. From his many interviews he legitimately seems concerned with shedding light on the conditions plaguing workers at China’s Foxconn facility (where many Apple products are built by human hands). It’s just that the most damning details - child employees as young as 12; workers whose repetitive job action led to medical defects - didn’t actually happen. At least, Mike Daisey didn’t see them happen.

Though Daisey was quick to offer a retraction in his theater show he offered a very familiar caveat: that he isn’t a journalist and thus thought he was exempt from the rules of reporting explicit fact. That the untrue horrors he wrote about was able to engage a larger audience via empathy. Like one-time Oprah guest and book club flub James Frey anything he publishes now has a cloud of uncertainty hanging over it. But what really hurts are the Foxconn workers, some of whom probably have horrific conditions that perhaps Daisey never got to see.

Curiously enough, this all happened around the same time in February as the release of the book-zine The Lifespan of a Fact by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal. Fingal, a fact checker at a magazine looking to publish an article from D’Agata about a Las Vegas teen suicide (an article that was eventually expanded into a book), began to cull through D’Agata’s article with a fine-tooth comb, picking at every factoid from witnesses interviewed by the police to street directions to the type of brick lining the driveway of the Stratosphere hotel where a young teenager plummeted to his death in 2003.

The book is structured in two parts that are printed parallel to each other. A box in the middle of each page contains D’Agata’s article, with surrounding text of back-and-forth conversation between Fingal, his boss, and D’Agata, who react to each claim (whether false or true). As is made clear right away, D’Agata is none too pleased with Fingal’s micro-fact checking skills and assures the young factchecker that the rules don’t technically apply to him, that his status as non-journalist (essayist, in his words) helps in his rewriting history to suit his literary pursuits. There are several instances where D’Agata excuses his manipulation of historical truth in pursuit of sentences that sound better when read aloud. Why say he fell for 8 seconds when the number 9 rolls off the tongue better?

The banter between Fingal and D’Agata turn downright nasty in some parts, introspective in others, and comes to a boiling point near the end where each side lays out his case before the judge (readers, in this case).

And who is ultimately right in the debate? In the case of accuracy vs. emotional truth D’Agata may be able to get away with his devices by justifying his intentions near the book’s end where he readily admits some blurring of the truth. But is he right when stating his intentions for pushing the boundaries of what the essay has come to signify in writerly pursuits? Or is he just bs’ing his way out of explaining what’s really at play here, messing with audience expectation? ( )

A fun dialogue over the fact-checking process of an essay purposefully riddled with factual inaccuracies. The two characters in the dialogue take rather cartoonish positions---D'Agata is a bullshitting aesthete; Fingal the Javert of journalistic fact---and their arguments, presented by example, are engaging. If D'Agata's prose were indeed aesthetically pleasing, and if I hadn't read this shortly after listening to the Mike Daisey stories on This American Life, I might have had more sympathy for D'Agata's main thrust. But things being as they are, he comes off as a pretentious prick. Still, recommended reading. ( )

A book which depicts the back and forth between the author (D'Agata) and fact-checker (Fingal) of an article about the suicide of a Las Vegas teen. D'Agata has bee excoriated in a number of reviews of this work for his stance that "fact" need not necessarily be slavishly adhered to in the "essay." Though I disagree with hime in many particular instances, much of this criticism is quite unfair, and all of it seems to miss that this book 1) is a performance by the two authors, in which each is playing a consciously exaggerated role; 2) the material the reviewers use to convict D'Agata has been supplied them, on purpose, by D'Agata, so disagree with him if you will but be careful about charges of arrogance, dishonesty and blindness; and 3) the book is really funny and full of interesting ironies.

The article in question was weaved into D'Agata's book "About A Mountain" which I have not read, but which even more oddly was criticized for being nethical and dishonest, despite the fact that the book included extensive notes describing each departure from fact. If nothing else, D'Agata has found a topic which exercises a lot of people.