A swipe at John D’Agata
John McPhee: “Is it wrong to alter a fact in order to improve the rhythm of your prose? I know so, and so do you. If you do that, you are by definition not writing nonfiction.”
Deresiewicz v. D’Agata
“It kills me to think that there are going to be people walking around who believe that Socrates was an essayist because a self-important ignoramus named D’Agata told them so.”
The lifespan of my interest in The Lifespan of a Fact
“What to make of a writer who claims to have changed a seemingly factual ‘thirty-one’ to ‘thirty-four’ because ‘the rhythm of “thirty-four” works better in that sentence’? Nothing, because that detail alone (on page 16, the second page of the text) made it easy for me to suspect that this book is not worth my time.”