Allegations that Greg Mortenson made up crucial portions of his first inspirational memoir, Three Cups of Tea, have cast doubt on every word he has supposedly written while once again highlighting the growing gulf between the popular literary genre labelled “creative non-fiction” and the comparatively drab world of actual fact. If it weren’t for the charges that Mr. Mortenson falsified his story to raise money from well-meaning donors, using it to promote his books instead of building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, his “creative” approach would rightly be seen as par for the course in publishing: the time-worn music of artful embellishment.
In his first response to the allegations this week, published online by Outside magazine, Mr. Mortenson shifted blame for his problems to the writers and editors with whom he collaborated. Professional writer David Oliver Relin, listed as a co-author of Three Cups of Tea, has long maintained that he wrote it all and that he objected – unsuccessfully – when the publisher insisted on adding Mr. Mortenson’s name to the title page. And this week Mr. Mortenson was keen to agree, saying he was uncomfortable when the literary types took license with facts he could not easily remember. “I would squawk about it and be told that it would all work out,” he said, adding that in retrospect he regrets not paying attention to the book he was supposedly co-writing.
Perhaps the most knowledgeable authority on the limits of embellishment is author James Frey, who became the object of widespread outrage when many of the facts in his alleged memoir, A Million Little Pieces, were shown to be fanciful. Originally repentant, Mr. Frey argued that “mixing fact and fiction isn’t new. It’s just become a big deal because of this marketing term, ‘memoir.’”
More recently, Penguin publishing cancelled a Holocaust memoir by another Oprah Winfrey favourite, Herman Rosenblat, after journalists revealed that its central conceit – how the author met his wife in a concentration camp – was false.
A few years earlier, author Norma Khouri sold hundreds of thousands of copies of a supposed memoir of “honour killing” in Jordan before a journalist exposed it as untrue from beginning to end. Englishman Archie Bellamy wrote the “autobiography” of an Ojibwa Indian named Grey Owl, a successful hoax repeated in the 21st century by an author of gay pornography who enjoyed great success with the heartbreaking memoirs of a non-existent native writer he called Nasdijj.
Although novels routinely include a notice claiming that all their characters and incidents are fictional, non-fiction books carry no equivalent guarantees of accuracy. Unlike many newspaper or magazine articles, non-fiction is rarely checked for accuracy before publication – and when challenged, proponents often invoke more exalted definitions of truth.
When esteemed biographer Edmund Morris was shown to have made up characters to populate Dutch, his authorized biography of Ronald Reagan, his publisher created a foreword noting “that even the most apparently imaginary episodes are nothing more than imaginative in execution. They merely tell the truth in ways altogether new.”
Millions of Mr. Mortensen’s fans will surely understand.
