So I’m working on this book about scientific controversies over identity politics, and as I do so, I am just stunned at how many instances I am finding of people just blatantly misrepresenting the work and words of others. I mean stunned—as stunned as my pet rat was when I accidentally dropped him into my son’s bath last night. And just as alarmed. (But drier.)
It is no exaggeration to say that a number of the controversies I’m looking at would simply never have happened had people early in the chain reaction bothered to go and find out what someone actually said or did.
Sometimes I wonder, am I the only writer out there still fact-checking my claims? I must have already unconsciously reached that fatalistic conclusion, because today, at the end of a phone interview with an Esquire reporter, the reporter asked me what phone number the fact-checker should call to reach me, and I was taken aback. Fact-checker? A fact-checker! There’s one left, and apparently she’s at Esquire! Quick, get a cheek swab from her so we continue the line if she dies out before she reproduces!
I had been thinking that maybe I’ve just picked up this fact-checking obsession o’ mine since getting embroiled in ongoing controversies. But then I realized that wasn’t the case. Because I distinctly remember that, when I was finishing my dissertation, I fact-checked it. I remember that because I remember coming upon a quotation without a citation. The quotation was about a hermaphroditic chicken. It was the only chicken in my dissertation. My dissertation was mostly about people, though there were a few fish, some cattle fetuses, and a sheep, if I remember correctly. And I only had two primary sources on chickens, so I knew the quotation had to be from one of those two sources. I read those two mind-numbingly boring sources again and again, unable to find the passage I had quoted.
I spent days looking for that particular hermaphroditic chicken. “Why,” I wondered to myself, “am I wasting all this time when no one is ever going to read this thing except maybe my committee? Just leave it in without a citation,” I told myself. But I couldn’t. Each day my partner came home from his third-year med school clinical rotations and asked me, “Found the chicken?”
I did finally find the chicken. In fact, I just now looked in my dissertation and verified that. It was a Leghorn fowl (see p. 89). And I’m sure that if I hadn’t found the source for the chicken quotation, I would have taken it out. Because I just don’t get the idea of making stuff up or even appearing to make stuff up. And yet, here I am, reading articles and indeed entire books which are full of made-up shit. (Oops, I mean “stuff.”) And these sloppy authors have been ruining other people’s reputations in the process of their sloppiness.
Maybe part of what’s going on here is that a lot of writers seem to be into the writing more than the content. They are comfortable following the saying my late grandfather-in-law had: “Well, if it isn’t true, it should be.” This saying came to mind after Lauren Slater visited a working group of which I was a member and wrote an article about a rather avant-garde surgeon who was also visiting with our group. In that article, Slater played fast and loose with the real order of events, and attributed identities to people that they didn’t have. (My friend Tod, for example, became a medical doctor. His Ph.D. is in Religious Studies.) She used “quotes” of things we’d said over lunch without apparently taking notes and without ever asking us to verify her memory of our lunch chatter. I wasn’t too surprised when I later learned that Slater’s memoir was called Lying.
What did surprise me was when that article about our group was included in “Best American Science Writing.” Science?! Science Fiction maybe.
Because seriously, what does it mean to get an award for non-fiction writing when you’re not too worried about the non part?
I know I sound bitchy here. It’s because I’m kind of jealous, honestly. I’m jealous of people who don’t spend days and days searching for hermaphroditic chickens, who don’t worry about whether the story is true, if the story is good.
But, jealous as I am, I know I could never be that kind of writer. For my own “Best Creative Non-Fiction” essay’s intro, when the editors asked me to write a paragraph about my relationship to the genre, this is what I wrote:
Whereas the typical muse forces her writer to sit alone, writing, mine forces me go be, go help, go act, and then come home and tell her all about it. Fiction would be so much easier; no research necessary, and I could, at will, switch personalities and bodies, events and imaginings, low places and climaxes. I’d be omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. But when I try to write fiction, my muse wants nothing to do with me. My muse—she’s a bitch for truth. Sure, she let’s me enjoy the writer’s high, but afterwards, instead of getting to lie back and burn through a cigarette, I have to turn on all the lights in my attic office, get out my highlighters, and fact-check…while she files her nails and nags, over my shoulder, to make sure I got everything exactly right. The only way to deal with this love affair is to live novel—to arrange my life so that I’ll be a good read. I think of it as marrying up.
I guess maybe in some ways, this is better. So many writers seem to suffer from depression. Me…my muse makes me stay busy—often helpful. And maybe that’s why I’m happy.
Maybe the truth really does set you free.