Jan Freeman writes The Word column for Ideas.
Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based writer, editor, and multimedia
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« More on China and Darfur | Main | Watch your life tick away... » Friday, March 30, 2007Heard v. Sedaris, cont.Poor Alex Heard! Ever since his "This American Lie" -- a takedown of David Sedaris, whom Heard caught in numerous falsehoods -- appeared, earlier this month, in The New Republic, he's taken a lot of flak. Sedaris is a humorist, people insist, so we don't expect all of his supposedly real-life anecdotes to be 100 percent true. And Heard's "prosecutorial swagger" (as somebody put it) just makes us all the more sympathetic to Sedaris.  Everybody's got something to hide 'cept for David Sedaris
Sedaris chose to call his work nonfiction and repeatedly assured interviewers that everything in his stories was true. Even so, at times he allowed himself the use of every fictional tool in the bag to make his stories better. That's a wonderful device to have at your disposal. Unfortunately, all the funny nonfiction writers I know would be fired if they were caught using it. Meanwhile, over at The New York Times Book Review... Posted by Joshua Glenn at 08:00 AM
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