Facts Are Fascinating Enough

After reading that fact-checker's back and forth with an uppity author, Hannah Goldfield considers the tension between art and nonfiction:

The conceit that one must choose facts or beauty—even if it’s beauty in the name of “Truth” or a true “idea”—is preposterous. A good writer—with the help of a fact-checker and an editor, perhaps—should be able to marry the two, and a writer who refuses to even try is, simply, a hack. If I’ve learned one thing at this job, it’s that facts can be quite astonishing. This is not to say that truth cannot be found in fiction. As E. M. Forster famously wrote, “Fiction is truer than history, because it goes beyond the evidence, and each of us knows from our own experience that there is something beyond the evidence.” But fiction does not lie to us—it creates other worlds, with other rules, that, if rendered well, can tell us something true about our own world.

Laura Miller concurs:

[Fact checking] compels you to stop insisting on what you want things to be and to come to terms with what they are. It is, above all, a humbling experience, a perpetual process of correction that, far from instilling a false sense of certainty, makes you ever more alert to the myriad ways you can screw things up by falling in love with your own ideas or accepting a conventional truth at face value. To me, this seems far more likely to break a person open and destabilize his understanding of himself and the world than hopping on D’Agata’s magic carpet ride of Art.