“This is a True Story”: The Value of Non-Truth in Creative Nonfiction
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Authors
Ring, Hillary Whitener
Issue Date
2013-05-07
Type
Thesis
Language
en_US
Keywords
Hillary Ring , James Frey , David Sedaris , Creative nonfiction , Creative writing , Cataloging and Classification--Libraries and Publishers , Literary Classifications , Truth--Nonfiction Literature , Nonfiction--History and criticism , Reality--Nonfiction , Reality--Fiction , Reality in Culture
Alternative Title
Abstract
This thesis explores the relationship between creative nonfiction and truth
through an analysis of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces and David Sedaris’s Naked.
Creative nonfiction is currently situated as a subcategory of nonfiction which subjects it
to all nonfiction’s caveats, especially with regards to truth. Both texts were criticized for
containing non-truths and thus infringing on the contract created between author and
reader through the nonfiction categorization. In both cases, the controversy was based
on a generalized definition of nonfiction as writing that is true. This thesis responds to
and disputes such a generalized definition of nonfiction and argues that effective
creative nonfiction writing can contain non-truths. Discussion of the reaction to Frey’s
text serves as an impetus for the discussion of truth in creative nonfiction, and unveils
glitches in the categorization system used by publishers and libraries, which labels books
as either fiction or nonfiction. Further, the controversy exposes an unwavering reliance
on those categorizations by readers despite textual clues that are perhaps contradictory
to a purely factual reading. The analysis of Sedaris’s Naked demonstrates the value of
utilizing fictional elements in a creative nonfiction text and validates Sedaris’s use of the
nonfiction label even for writing that contains fabrications. Together, the analyses
reveal important questions about the assumptions a reader should make about texts
based on labels. This thesis finds the nonfiction label, in particular, overly broad and
questions why many readers accept nonfiction as a verifiable contract for truth, instead
of utilizing their own, perhaps more sophisticated, sorting mechanisms for determining
truth from non-truth.
Description
A Thesis submitted by Hillary Ring to the Graduate School Valdosta State University in partial fulfillment f requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in English in the Department of English of the College of Arts and Sciences May 2013.