One might think that—following the James Frey vs. Oprah blowout and the Opal Mehta train wreck of 2006, along with countless other examples since—writers would have gotten the message that how you write your book is just as important as, if not more important than, what you write.Evidently, Ben Mezrich missed the memo.
Rumors suggest he’s cranky that people are questioning his reporting tactics in his recently published non-fiction account of the founding of Facebook.
A recent Reuters article reports:
BusinessWeek called the book, published by Doubleday, a “tawdry mishmash” and said Mezrich wrote “a fictionalized account of the founding of Facebook.” Mezrich dismisses that as elitist claptrap. “It’s a nonfiction book. It’s a true story,” he told Reuters in an interview. “I am a narrative nonfiction writer in a way that other people don’t write. I’m trying to create my own genre of nonfiction.”
So, readers are supposed to just read and enjoy his book, and not concern themselves with pesky little details like facts? I guess that makes sense. After all, as Homer Simpson so blithely put it, “Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that’s even remotely true!”
--Rachel Frier
Photo by Guido Vitti/Boston Magazine
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