Me talk pretty true one day

This Friday, hometown hero David Sedaris is speaking in Durham.

It’s been an odd year for Sedaris. A persistent debate about accuracy in nonfiction — prompted, among other things, by fabrication scandals with journalists Mike Daisey and Jonah Lehrer — has thrust his writing under a microscope.

Almost everyone agrees: Sedaris is a little bit of a liar. Does that matter?

Opinions about Sedaris tend to fall into two camps, either that he stretches the truth in his writing, or that his fantastical storytelling communicates a larger truth, one that justifies embellishment.

When Daisey did an expose on Apple’s factories for This American Life earlier this year, his agenda was to influence the way millions of people regard a product.

And he was effective: When I first heard the story, I swore to never buy an Apple product.

Discovering that Daisey intentionally edited crucial information out of his piece, then, was shocking. I felt duped.

But when a memoirist like Sedaris develops a highly specific genre (to wit: more wacky stories about my wacky American family) he has no agenda except portraying his own history. He doesn’t claim that all of it is completely true, just that his memory of it is. He is postulating a larger truth, but he also admits that some small truths are put through a fun-house effect along the way.

Introducing a larger truth is, of course, risky. The problem with Daisey and Lehrer is that they were trying to communicate important facts that didn’t require embellishment — but by cheating, they suffered a quick fall from public grace.

While I care if a journalist fabricated a quote, I don’t particularly care if Sedaris exaggerated his family vacation.

Sedaris falls into a long lineage of American mythology. Particularly in the South, the ability to spin a yarn is prized. We don’t impose a degree of New Yorker fact-checking onto the stories our grandparents tell us, because tall tales are fun.

We are (or should be) smart enough to discern plot from detail in work like Sedaris’. It’s a different medium than journalism and should be treated differently.

For whatever reason, nonfiction writing possesses more cultural currency than ever before. Anecdotal writing magnetizes people, even though it toes a tenuous line between fiction and nonfiction.

And in a world saturated with political and commercial fictions, that tenuous line matters. But perhaps the important part about grappling with literary truth is that, at the very least, we do grapple.

Whenever I talk to people about Sedaris, they get a possessive glint in their eye.

“Oh, David?” they say casually, as if to mark their territory. People adore him, and it’s because he’s good at what he does: rummaging through our weird, complicated cultural imagination to find truth.

Oh, David.