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I never heard of James Frey until the story broke that his memoir had been researched by The Smoking Gun and found considerably wanting in veracity. By that time I knew there was another literary fraud out there. Matthew Fleischer had solicited my opinion of the identity of Nasdijj, a purported part-Navajo memorialist. I told Matthew that Nasdijj and Tim Barrus were one in the same, based on my reading of Nasdijj's website, and my conviction that Barrus's style was both indelible and inimitable. Yet I remained uncertain whether Nasdijj was Barrus's invention or vice versa until Fleischer published the results of his investigation in LA Weekly. I gathered a few essentials of the fraud of J.T. Leroy from the many stories that followed about Frey or Nasdijj or both.

The many news stories that identified Nasdijj as Tim Barrus invariably identified Barrus as an author of gay pornography or euphemisms to that effect. Barrus had brought the memoir into disrepute and had even brought gay pornography into disrepute. I was bound to take that personally since memoir and gay pornography are nearly the only things I have ever done. And that was not to mention what J.T. Leroy had done to hustling. Nasdijj's first book borrowed much from the genuine Native American writer Sherman Alexie, who complained to Nasdijj's publisher while the book was still in galleys, but I am told it also owes something to Travels with Lizbeth. I do not know if that is true because I have not read Nasdijj's book, and I know that Travels with Lizbeth is often mentioned whenever a more recent book touches the subject of homelessness. Homelessness, of course, was never my identity, and indeed I have often wished I were a little less identified with it, so I have no difficulty deferring to Alexie in the pecking-order of the outraged, except for the gay pornographer thing: admittedly an identification that Barrus as Nasdijj never claimed, but managed to besmirch nonetheless. Barrus has repeatedly denied being gay since as Barrus he exploited the gay market.

I am about to say a few things about the difficulty, yes even the impossibility, of capturing some complete, ultimate, absolute truth in literature. I know that to some readers that amounts to a confession that all writers are liars. And to some writers the choice seems to be between a difficult path that can at best result in imperfection and an easier and often more lucrative path. I still think there is a difference between imperfection and fraud, and that one is preferable to the other.

In retrospect, I see many little odd things that occurred as Travels with Lizbeth found its way to publication and afterward and that seem to suggest that some literary people did not then, a dozen years ago and more, expect outsider literature, even an outsider memoir, to be entirely on the up and up. I have remarked many times that those who met me seemed to believe it happened to me, but I did not write it, and those who had not met me seemed to believe I had written it, but it did not happen.

I recall in particular a review in, if memory serves, The Washington Post which complained that my book was episodic and the stories of people described in it were left unresolved. I cannot now resist replying that any truthful account of homelessness is necessarily episodic, and I did not tell what became of many of the people I met because I felt constrained by what I knew to be true about their fates, which in most cases was nothing. If I had been writing a novel, I would have had the liberty to tie up loose ends. (Kirkus was not particularly kind either, for they supposed my title had invited a comparison with Steinbeck's Travels with Charlie. In truth, I did not know until my book was out that there ever was a Travels with Charlie. A bit of Tortilla Flat had been included in a high literature book which I had been assigned and it was sufficiently dismal that I never thought of disturbing Steinbeck again. I regret my title. I certainly would have chosen something else, if I had known. I wish someone had told me.)

Now calls come for better vetting by the publishing industry. Stung by these scandals and especially the Nasdijj fraud, I agree in the main, but I cannot suggest what the standards for vetting might be or how they might be implemented. In the case of Travels with Lizbeth there were plenty of people who had many long letters and postcards from me that contained contemporaneous accounts of events that appeared in the book, some who had long distance bills for collect calls from me in various places, journalists who had witnessed Lizbeth being apprehended by the dog catcher and who had helped to bail her out, and so forth. That would largely establish I had been where I was when I said I was. I really rather wished someone had vetted the fiery crash that I witnessed north of Azusa. I suppose there were police reports if not local news accounts. I have always wondered if my surmises from the evidence I found were correct. Those were the two most dramatic events in my book, and both were easily verifiable. But who in the world could vouch for the conversations between a hitchhiker and a driver on a stretch of I-10 in Arizona, in the middle of the night, when no other car was in sight?

Alas, proving any memoir true in every detail or even in the most salient parts seems an impossible task. But in the cases in point, showing the abject frauds to be false, should not have been very difficult. Prisons and jails have records; it would have been an easy matter with the author's cooperation, to vet Frey's book - had it been the truth. I do not know much about the J.T. Leroy case, but it strains credulity that the author's sex remained a mystery. The great detective work Fleischer did was in determining that Nasdijj was Barrus, but some readers had detected that Nasdijj was not who he claimed in galleys. Nasdijj played fast-and-loose about how Navajo he and his mother were, but nonetheless how could he have named his mother's clan without knowing Navajo clans are matrilineal? It was not a matter of having to try to figure out how to determine whether some particular, perhaps unwitnessed, event had occurred. He was not who he said he was, and all the warning flags were out, and the people who were reading them were being ignored.

Were the details of Thoreau's life at Walden Pond entirely true? Was The Making of a Surgeon entirely free of urban legends? I am sorry. I do not see that piling up all the known untruths in indisputable literature in any way justifies the propagation of untruth today. As promised I will now proceed to say why it is impossible to tell the truth without meaning to give license to the telling of untruth.

Art cannot capture life. This truth is so galling that it has itself become a recurring theme of art. The physics of the Twentieth century may or may not have provided some consolation: it is not merely that we are bad artists, though we may be, but that the observer cannot be divorced from the observed as a physical fact. The error of observation is in the fabric of reality, and that puts paid to any notion of expressing perfect truth.

Now only a little literature is devoted to the fate of subatomic particles, so we might back up a bit and hope for Newtonian truth: that which we know is not quite so, but works well for all practical purposes. For that, I suggest the exercise of trying to put on paper the reality of a quiet, furnished but uncluttered room as it is in a period of one minute. Very dull and superficial writers may complete this task to their satisfaction within a volume or two. The digital age gives us a chance to make some comparisons of amounts of information, and a single perspective snapshot of a room, not particularly sharp and in a lossy format, often contains as much information as a good sized novel. That is only one visual perspective, leaving out all the other possible camera angles, the sounds, the smells, and the human associations of objects in the room. In short, we cannot write all the truth even if we are rather loose about what we mean by truth.

I realize bringing up the truth of physics and the truth of mathematics may seem facetious to readers who are concerned about the truth of human experience, but the problem of portraying reality at the physical level underlies and models the problems of portraying reality at other levels. For example, the observer problem crops up again in cultural anthropology. People just do not trip over themselves to reveal the secrets of their cultures to exotic strangers in pith helmets. What is more, it is even rather difficult for a person native to a culture to write informatively about it unless he is in some degree alienated from it. A fair definition of culture is that which is commonplace and which everyone takes for granted — or precisely the sorts of things that naïve native writers or commentators will never think to mention. One of the things that tripped faux-Navajo Nasdijj up was his mention of being given mutton tacos by a supposedly traditional Navajo woman in gratitude for reading lessons. This error was detected by Irvin Morris who is far from naïf, but almost certainly would never have thought to write that Navajo tacos are never made of mutton if Nasdijj had not made the mistake.

If you ask people of a certain culture to draw an elephant, they will draw something of an eagle-eye's view of a splayed elephant with four legs spread out as if the elephant became a rug under some great squashing thing from the heavens. Racists argued that these people were too stupid to learn perspective. But they do not use perspective because they reckon it is a lie. If you draw an elephant in perspective, the far legs are smaller than the near ones. We may have seen an elephant like that, but no elephant we have seen is like that. If the elephant is in profile, the far legs may be hidden behind the near ones. The elephant is depicted as having two legs. No one has seen a two-legged elephant. It may be argued just as well that no one has seen an elephant that looks likes the splayed elephant, but it does represent an elephant as everyone very well knows an elephant is. Western art, at least for a time, aimed to portray what one eye sees, but Western philosophy well knew that what one eye sees is a deception. The elephant in perspective is a deception. The squashed splayed elephant is also a deception, but at least it shows that an elephant has four legs, approximately equal in size.

Whether you pick out a stereo based on a photograph or a schematic very much depends upon whether you think of it as furniture or as electronics, and of course whether you have the knowledge to make any sense of a schematic. Neither the picture nor the schematic is the stereo, neither completely represents the stereo. Yet, in many cases, neither is a lie. And so it is in all of art, including literature.

Yes, it is hopeless, as anyone facing a blank piece of paper or more often nowadays a blank screen, to put the truth in letters. And a certain sort of mentality will, having realized that, think: if it cannot be the truth, then why shouldn't it be the lie most likely to profit me. To be charitable, I think, probably there are also people who write lies because they live lies, because they are entirely composed of lies, because all the truth they know is lies. Not all of them have Korsakov's syndrome, but I am convinced that many of them have never made the conscious decision to lie. They simply know nothing else.

But many of us, whether we faced the terror of the blank screen for years or only for a moment, try to make the best of it and to muddle through however we can, which is what people do once they accept that a situation is utterly hopeless.

Literature has several main lines of muddling. One of them is fiction. I will not say much about fiction because essentially fiction is fraud-proof. I will not accept complaints about fiction even if the dust jacket stuff about the supposed author is completely unrelated to events on this planet. Fiction can convey truth or can be vacuous. The problem today is that the market for general fiction is very soft. And indeed, that seems to have played a part in the frauds of the moment, for at least in a couple of cases the authors are said to have tried to present their works at first as fiction but were persuaded that it was unpublishable as such. If only we had a genre for depressing agony fiction. Evidently people will buy agony literature if they are told it is true.

When we try to muddle toward the truth and mean to be understood to be aiming in that direction, we call it nonfiction, which covers much territory. We might take, as the model of nonfiction, a mathematics text which barring error could be said to perfectly true except that it rests upon its axioms which are axioms precisely because they cannot be shown to be either true or false. History is reckoned nonfiction too, but histories often reach opposing conclusions upon the same source material. Modern historians despise mere lists of events and dates and such as we as school children struggled to memorize when we thought we were learning history, and there is something to be said for the modern view, since we hardly gained any appreciation of the past from learning 1066 by rote, and all the accounts of palace intrigues tell us so very little about the past, while modern intrigues differ so very slightly from those of yore. Whether history should tell more about the past than about the present is a nice question.

And so we might go through all the catalogue of nonfiction and at each stopping place discover that no type of work expresses perfect truth until we come to the sort of accounts which most interest us: the stories of more-or-less contemporary events on the human scale. Here the facts are as much against us as the literary form. The facts are that witnesses to any given event are almost never in perfect agreement as to what they have witnessed, and apart from the attempt to render events in writing, such disagreements occur through the range of human events from the simplest domestic discussion to famous murder trials to international incidents upon which turn decisions of war and peace. The issue may be whether a spouse asked for a loaf bread to be fetched from the store or whether the getaway car was tan or green or possibly dark blue or who launched the poison gas attack: disagreement about what has actually occurred is commonplace. What is more, although we may think we understand it when accounts differ so that each is to the best advantage of the teller, the remarkable thing is how often there are serious disagreements among wholly disinterested parties who have no discernible reason to lie and who appear in every respect to be earnest and sincere. We can often guess how or why some or all of the witnesses went wrong, when stories change we can sometimes explain it, but that many witnesses who tell untruths have never intended to deceive is a disturbing but inevitable conclusion.

In reality people disagree, and that is a thing apart from the limitations and distortions that may be introduced when art attempts to capture the reality. Literature has two broad approaches in the attempt to muddle through, in spite of the factual disagreements and its own limitations. One we may call journalism, and the other, memoir.

The approach of traditional journalism — before so-called advocacy journalism — was simply to try to record so many of the differing accounts as possible. This is: what he said, what she said, and the third person could not be reached for comment. The hope was to produce a fair account, in which each side had had its say, and although often it was impossible that all accounts were true, still it might be that the survey would produce a broad agreement on the boundaries of the truth, and readers could make up their own mind about the finer details. If there were no agreement as to what was said, we might know at least that there had been a conversation and might have a notion about its subject. If there were four accounts of who fired the fatal shot, at least the fact of a corpse would be revealed.

The principal limitation of the journalistic approach is that in many cases all accounts are treated as if they were equally credible or at least respectable. The ridiculous extreme of this would be that the journalist should solicit a comment from the Flat Earth Society whenever someone else is quoted as saying the earth is round. That does seem thoroughly ridiculous, except history is replete with examples in which the tiny crank minorities have been proven correct. And of course, if nine witnesses say the getaway car was green and one says it was blue, sometimes it turns out the culprit boarded a crosstown bus.

Memoir hopes to come at a rather different sort of truth by a rather different method. If journalism can be compared to the splay-elephant drawing, memoir is the perspective view. The truth of memoir — that is the truth that memoir muddles toward — is the truth of experience. That five people attending the same event have five experiences that differ in greater or lesser degree is rather beside point and taken for granted. If the danger of journalism is that the truth may be lost in babel, the danger of memoir is that it will slip into solipsism. The memoir ought to be one honest account, not all accounts however honest.

I do not mean in any way to shift the responsibility for the honesty of the memoir to anyone other than the author and especially not to the reader. Nonetheless, all the worth of even the most honest memoir — if it have any — depends upon the reader knowing what it is and how to understand it. The perspective view of the elephant does not seem absurd when we know it is a perspective drawing, and neither does the schematic when we understand the schematic approach. I do not blame credulous readers for the frauds that have lately come to light, but I know from questions I receive about my own work, that there are many uncritical readers who have never understood that what I have written is only my side of the story. I do not see that it compromises my belief in the honesty of my story to acknowledge that others did not see things as I did and that many of them may be as honest and sincere as I feel myself to be. No doubt novelists are similarly frustrated when they have been at pains to create an unreliable narrator and find that there are nonetheless readers who believe whatever the narrator says.

Then of course there are readers who, when confronted with categorical evidence of abject fraud, say "What does it matter? It was a good story." But if that was their attitude, why wouldn't they buy it as a novel? or at least why did people whose livelihoods depend upon such judgments think the books would not have sold as novels? Oprah's first response to the Frey scandal was of the "it doesn't matter whether it was true" sort. But would she have put forth the book if it had been presented as a novel? Oprah's approval means hundreds of thousands in sales which can hardly be a bad thing for an author, or for publishing in general especially as one suspects those sales come from a market that would otherwise be buying pulp novels at the supermarket or no books at all. Yet from her mentions from 2004, long before the trouble, it is hard to pick out a significant novel — certainly nothing of the caliber of Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple. Plenty of the nonfiction, of course, is fluff: wedding planners, self-help books, and so forth, but it is hard to find admitted fiction even of the fluffy kind.

To some extent I blame required reading. Required reading in high school tends to be the most bloodless, which is to say lifeless, sort in order to avoid the school board's receiving complaints from born-again parents, and this situation is going to get worse as theocracy tightens its death grip on America. Required reading in college includes stuff that is no longer quite so spry as it was when it was written and stuff that appeals to scholars whose sense of pertinence is usually at least a generation behind the times. So if someone pronounces a new novel "serious," the crepe hangers are overjoyed. That does not make lying okay or excuse fraud, but I think it has something to do with why people try to pass off novels as memoirs.