. . . Pants on Fire

[chidder]

Last week yet another memoirist was outed (this time by her sister no less!) as nothing more than a lowly fiction writer; once again begging the question: why didn't they just publish their works as fiction in the first place?

Ego and greed, probably.

Not discounting these writers' duplicity in dealing with their publishers, what's truly troubling

Comments

I'd like to widen the view from your monocle...

[nyexeccoach]

"The truth is never more malleable than in the hands of a writer."
The prisons are full of guilty individuals who insist " I didn't do it!"

Writers enjoy no monopoly on the art of the lie.
Denial is a way of life for many who ply their trade in various incarnations.
At least when a writer lies he generally knows enough about math to employ the correct "syntax."

Let me just say, for the record however, "I didn't do it!"

[chidder]

Werner Herzog is perhaps an even better example of a documentarian whose pursuit of (to use his own words) "a deeper strata of truth" in his films doesn't prevent him from coaching his interviewees until they say what he wants them to say how he wants them to say it (the medical examiner in Grizzly Man), making up quotes (Lessons of Darkness opens with words from Pascal that are actually Herzog's own), or having his subjects do things they wouldn't normally do (Dieter Dengler, in Little Dieter Needs to Fly, exercising his freedom by opening and closing doors several times before passing through them). The list goes on and on. But despite all these manipulations, I'm hard-pressed to think of a filmmaker--documentary or otherwise--with a truer body of work.