News and Memoir: Fact or Fiction?
Headline this morning: Canadian gets bird flu in Turkey
That sounds like an interesting early morning coffee-sipping browse. And oddly enough, the piece in the Toronto Star is written engagingly as a second person narrative. One assumes as you read along that the 'you' in the piece is actually the author's experience. He touched a shovel found near a chicken coup in Turkey to dig his car out of a ditch. He was quarantined in a Turkish hospital. He landed in Toronto with worsening flu-like symptoms.
Then you reach the end of the piece, and nothing. No resolution, no attribution of the voice of the piece, no confirmation or denial of there having been a sick Canadian aboard a jet landing in Toronto--which is rather important news for those who flew with him.
If a fictional account, it should be labeled as such. Though written in an interesting way, if factual, it is sadly lacking the objective facts one expects from the press. Maybe the whole thing is just the author's too-vivid imagination. And funny I should read not moments later about James Frey's 'million little problems' because of his dishonest 'memoir.'
Yes, we need the diversion of fiction. But we need to know when fact is only masquerading as such. Truth. Or consequences.