In the midst of the U.S. pushing into Venezuelan oil fields, discussing something as seemingly trivial as fiction versus nonfiction might feel out of place. But then, after hearing Trump’s justification for reclaiming oil that Venezuelans “stole” from us—oil we had once stolen from them—and watching Hegseth strut around mouthing empty rhetoric, maybe now is the perfect time to dive into the blend of fiction and nonfiction as a fresh form of journalism.
I remember being genuinely shocked when I discovered that Edmund Morris’ biography of Ronald Reagan included fictional characters, added to supposedly help explain his character and the events surrounding him. It made me question where we draw the line between fact and fiction. Similarly, when I watch movies "based on a true story," I can’t help but immediately start researching what really happened, craving the truth behind the narrative.
Last night, I picked up Gay Talese’s Thy Neighbor’s Wife again—a book I started a couple of years ago but abandoned due to discomfort. It wasn’t just the prurient aspects that made me uneasy; Talese’s exploration into the private lives of couples, presented as a “non-fictional” analysis of cultural shifts, felt intrusive, even though it was framed as objective. I had the same reservations reading The Voyeur’s Motel—how could Talese possibly know everything he was claiming based only on interviews? But maybe I’m just overly fixated on footnotes and citations.
Despite my discomfort, these books are undeniably intriguing. Talese’s section on Al Goldstein and Screw magazine was especially captivating. Still, after reading Fanny Hill as a teenager, I suspect that human sexual behavior hasn’t really changed much. What’s different now is our increasing openness about it—or maybe we’re just returning to the less repressed attitudes of the Greeks and Romans, who weren’t burdened by centuries of Augustine-driven guilt.
Talese isn’t the only one to blur the lines between fact and fiction in pursuit of a more “authentic” truth. Truman Capote famously claimed that In Cold Blood was entirely true. But we now know he invented its most emotional and pivotal scene. That’s not a small discrepancy—it’s a fundamental contradiction in narrative nonfiction. We approach “true” stories with a certain trust in their factuality, believing the writer is a reliable conduit to reality. But constructing a “true story” is far from simple. It’s an artistic, ethical endeavor where the line between objective fact and subjective truth becomes uncomfortably—and perhaps compellingly—blurred. Capote’s work is hailed as a masterpiece of reportage, yet critics quickly pointed out the fictionalized scenes and how he "sentimentalized" Perry Smith, the murderer, to serve his artistic vision.
But to judge the book by its factual purity is to miss Capote’s more radical ambition. His goal was not immaculate fact, but immaculate truth.His work argues that the highest truth is not found in a sterile recitation of facts, but in a profound, if controversial, honesty of intent.
While some writers bend facts for artistic effect, Edmund Morris shattered them entirely in Dutch, his 1999 biography of Ronald Reagan. Frustrated by his subject’s enigmatic nature, Morris inserted fictional characters into the narrative, fabricated historical documents, and—in a move that horrified the academic world (and me)—created false footnotes that cited these nonexistent materials. (I guess the hallucinogenic aspects of AI are copied from Morris.) In an interview with C-Span Morris claimed to not be a historian; he said historians were “a different breed of cat” and that, unlike them, he was not particularly interested in politics and government. Rather, he said, he was interested in “character, narrative, the strangeness of reality.” (2)
This was not a creative choice shared with the reader; it was a deliberate breach of trust. The book was marketed as biography, not fiction. For historians — and me — footnotes represent a sacred pact with the reader, a guarantee of scholarly rigor. The backlash was severe.
Compare that with the extreme reality of Robert Caro’s biographies of Robert Moses and LBJ.
Robert Caro’s work suggests that if we look hard enough at the world as it was, the "why" will eventually reveal itself through the "what." He builds a cathedral of facts, confident that the sheer mass of evidence will stand the test of time. His meticulousness in pursuing every little detail and fact is legendary.
In contrast, Talese, Capote, and Morris treat the past as a draft that requires a literary finish. They argue that a list of facts is a skeleton, but only the "invention" of narrative can provide the flesh and blood. While Caro’s method offers more reliability, the literary approach often offers more resonance. Ultimately, Caro provides the history we need to understand power, while the others provide the stories we use to understand ourselves. Of the three, I find Talese’s style more honest if less reliable. In Thy Neighbor’s Wife he’s trying to convey a truth through a series of very personal montages.
I guess ultimately it’s all going to depend on the reader. My preference is always for reliability and facts, but I can appreciate the author’s desire for some kind of general truth. But, I will never read the Morris biography of Reagan. A similar biography of Trump, given his penchant for prevarication, would be well-served by Morris.
Notes and Sources:
(1) The controversy surrounding Edmund Morris’s "Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan" (1999) is often cited as one of the greatest "scandals" in the history of modern biography.
After winning a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Theodore Roosevelt, Morris was granted unprecedented access as the first authorized biographer of a sitting president. However, what he produced after 14 years of research was not a traditional biography, but a "postmodern experiment" that infuriated historians and political allies alike. Most controversially, Morris included fictitious endnotes and citations to document the letters and conversations of these made-up people, making it nearly impossible for a casual reader to distinguish fact from fantasy. Morris claimed he was “desperate” because Reagan was such an “airhead” as to make him impenetrable. The Reagan family was not happy.
Caro would have looked at Reagan’s "airhead" reputation and spent five years researching Reagan's private radio scripts and letters to prove exactly how much he knew (Caro eventually concluded that power is always conscious).
Morris took that same "airhead" reputation and, instead of finding more facts, decided that the only way to explain it was to invent a fictional narrator who could be as confused as he was.
Sources:
Caro, Robert A. Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing. Alfred A. Knopf, 2019.
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6442/the-art-of-biography-no-5-robert-caro
https://faculty.etsu.edu/odonnell/readings/capote_fact_check.pdf (Article about mixing Capote’s mixing of fact and fiction. It’s a fascinating story of how The New Yorker, famous for fact-checking, handled Capote’s work before serializing it in the magazine)
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