Charles Bock invites you to be outraged. This past Sunday Bock reviewed John D’Agata’s new nonfiction book, “About a Mountain,” describing the material this way:

The mountain that John D’Agata is ostensibly concerned with … is Yucca Mountain, located approximately 100 miles north of Las Vegas. … [S]ince the mid-1980s, the United States government has been doing back flips to bury the country’s entire reservoir of spent nuclear waste — some 77,000 tons of apocalyptic yumminess — deep inside Yucca. In the summer of 2002, the summer after D’Agata helped his mother move to a Vegas suburb, Congress was proceeding with plans to make the mountain a nuclear dump. Also that summer, 16-year-old Levi Presley jumped to his death from the observation deck of a third-rate Vegas hotel. These subjects, disparate though they are, animate D’Agata’s sprawling narrative.

But Bock doesn’t want to direct your outrage toward government backed destruction of the environment, youth suicide, or even sprawling nonfiction narratives. No. He wants to direct your rage to a few of D’Agata’s footnotes.

Yes, that’s right: the footnotes.

With such weighty material to discuss, it seems ridiculous to zero in on footnotes but perhaps these are some outrageous footnotes, deserving of the full weight of our scorn. D’Agata writes nonfiction, you see, and he acknowledges in one of his naughty footnotes that he conflates the dates of two key events in his story by three days. MY GOD.

Bock uses inflammatory language, calling the material referred to by the footnote a “lie.” He goes on to charge D’Agata with playing “fast and loose with a verifiable historical date.” I suppose this is true if by “verifiable” Bock means that he had to read the footnote where D’Agata presents the discrepancy. But I wonder if adding footnotes to nonfiction really deserves the “fast and loose” qualifier that’s typically employed to discuss immoral women, or deviant sexual behavior (as fun as those things can be!).

To be fair, Bock speaks highly of D’Agata’s work:

Rarely does D’Agata betray his emotions or reactions to an event; rather, he works by establishing a scene, introducing tangentially related elements, building layers of complexity and scope, then jump-cutting or circling back at just the right moment, guiding the reader safely — and unexpectedly — to a destination D’Agata had in sight the whole time.

And Bock understands the bigger picture. He knows what D’Agata is trying to do with creative nonfiction, not just in this book, but in the whole of his career:

As D’Agata himself writes, in his introduction to “The Lost Origins of the Essay”: “Do we read nonfiction in order to receive information, or do we read it to experience art? It’s not very clear sometimes. So this is a book that will try to offer the reader a clear objective: I am here in search of art.”

But ultimately Bock finds D’Agata’s voice lacking, having lost nothing less than his “moral authority” by conflating these dates. Although D’Agata offers no explanation for this conflation, Bock helpfully tenders a reason of his own: “for the sake of a tight narrative hook.” I don’t know. I haven’t read the book. But even knowing that the date of this child’s suicide has been conflated with some important back room vote doesn’t make the hook of this hard-to-grasp story much tighter for me. In Bock’s own words, the hook seems built on “layers of complexity and scope”; it does not easily give itself to a quick one line summary: this boy dies, that deal done. But even if we concede that a tidier hook is the reason for the conflation: Is it worthy of our scorn?

I’d argue that all of creative nonfiction suffers when we—writers and readers of creative nonfiction—allow journalists to manipulate us so easily. We do have to be wary of authors who pass off their fictions as truth. But do we need to be so dogmatic that a footnote raises a larger cry from us than anything found in our texts?

Of course, Bock can evaluate the book and the writer in whatever way he chooses. And calling into question the veracity of nonfiction is (sadly) the norm these days. I do want to know if the nonfiction book I’m reading has been made up. I just get tired of journalists revving up the scorn machine to score a point.

If John D’Agata can lose the moral high ground for footnoting his work, what does that say about us as readers and writers?

I got a little reminder about why I write nonfiction today at Aaron’s football jamboree. 

This is his first year out for football, so I was interested in getting to know the rest of the parents. I was standing on the sidelines watching the drills. One of the boys on the team hollered to the man standing next to me about what he had brought for the team’s snack. The man hollered back about having picked up a twelve pack of something from the local warehouse store and his boy beamed. I was so amused by this exchange: the importance of the snack, the boy’s earnest query, Dad’s dutiful reply. I stopped taking photographs and grinned at the man.

I pointed out my son, and we struck up a conversation.

When I asked him what grade and school his son attended, he told me the boy had recently switched to a new school and was doing poorly. I told him I had had the same experience myself, switching to a new school.

The man surprised me by asking, “Did you make it?”

By this I understood him to mean, did you make it to graduation, are you a high school graduate, which I am not. I am embarrassed to say that I came this >< close to lying to the man. I felt a huge wave of shame roll over me–me, Mr. Memoir, a guy who has written about being a divorcee, an absentee father, shooting IV drugs, and even being homeless. There is just something intimidating about being asked something like this point blank in a conversation. I really wasn’t sure what to say. I started to bluster, but then I finally just smiled and said, “Nah–not really.”

This man grinned and said, “Me either.”

We had a good chuckle. I didn’t get his name, but I connected with this man in a way I would not have had I tried to save face by going on about my time in college, the military, or even getting my GED.

When Dan Jones of the New York Times called about publishing one of my stories for Modern Love, I was delighted. I was also determined not to let him know I had a drug history. Dan had emailed me that he thought my story might work well for Father’s Day and wanted to discuss it more by phone. I immediately thought: Don’t tell him about the drugs. He’ll think you’re a loser. But then when he called, we talked for less than five minutes before my drug history came up.

It went something like this:

“So if your son was in Pennsylvania with your ex-wife, what were you doing in New York City?” Dan asked.

I chuckled demurely. Lying seemed like a bad idea.

“Well,” I said taking a deep breath. “That’s another story.”

As it turns out, Dan is a great guy who quickly put me at ease. “I hear stuff like this all the time,” he said. He sounded like an AA sponsor or a Catholic priest. I guess if you’re going to be the editor for a column like Modern Love, you end up hearing your share of confessions.

So I told him my story. I had been in an inpatient drug treatment program in the Bronx. He asked the obvious: What type of drug?

“Heroin,” I said, my voice sounding squeaky and small.

I told him about the first time I tried it. I was seventeen and I used for about 10 years after that. I made it clear that I wasn’t interested in adding any of this information to the story, which Dan had said needed to be fleshed out more. If I were originally worried that Dan would think less of me for using drugs, now I was concerned that he would ask me to add my drug history to the story. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that. You tell people you have a drug history and you never know what to expect.

Dan assured me we didn’t need to add any information I wasn’t comfortable revealing. But now there was a different problem. He was hesitant, taking his time to make his next point.

“Is it honest?” Dan asked.

This question confused me. I started thinking about the James Frey scandal, but that’s not where Dan was going. To clarify his position, he quoted a line from my essay. “You wrote,” Dan said, “that you ‘couldn’t help but feel guilty about [your] divorce, even though [you weren’t] the one who had asked for it.’”

There was a pause. I still didn’t get his point.

“That puts the reader’s sympathies on your side,” he said. There was another pause as I let this information sink in.

“It certainly does,” I said. I chuckled nervously. Dan is too nice a guy to finish that sentence, but I thought I understood where he was going. Is it honest to let the reader feel sympathy for an addict? Would leaving this information out be some sort of lie of omission?

It’s a legitimate question. If you’re an editor, your first obligation has to be to your readers. I felt a little uncomfortable, but I definitely had an opinion. Two people can have different interpretations of the same event, but here is one thing of which I am certain: I never wanted that divorce. More important, the story I wrote was about the relationship I created with my oldest son, despite having been an absentee father. Adding the drug history would have overpowered that story and pulled the drug problem center stage. The story about the relationship with my son would have gotten the short shrift. I didn’t want to do that. I don’t mind talking about my drug history in the right context. I’ve come to terms with that part of my past and have even written about it and intend to write more. But I’m not sure that means I have to include a disclaimer in every essay I write.

I didn’t mention any of this to Dan that afternoon on the phone. To be honest, I didn’t know what to say. In desperation, I told him that my ex-wife knew about my drug use right from the start. This is actually the truth. I think I told her about the drugs on our second date. I remember popping my collar and saying something like, “Baby.” (I was trying to channel James Dean or Elvis.) “I’m bad news. And you better stay away from me.”

What teenage girl could resist that?

Although it was the truth, I felt bad presenting it to Dan this way. If I blame my ex-wife for leaving me, what does that say about me? Now I was getting flustered. I stood up and started to pace from living room to kitchen and back, all the while talking. I found myself telling Dan about how terrible I felt right after the divorce. I talked about my fruitless effort to woo her back. I even mentioned my father and his failed marriage. Although my parents had never divorced, I had sworn I would never be anything like Dad.

Pretty soon Dan interrupted me.

He had made his decision. He took the story with some minor revisions and no drug history. Looking back, I’m glad I didn’t try to defend my position with a reasoned argument: Instead I let my story speak for me. What could be more honest than that?

Last month Holly and I got to see David Sedaris at Elliott Bay Book Company here in Seattle. He was promoting his latest book, When You are Engulfed in Flames, which is a collection of previously published essays and some new material. The most enjoyable part of the evening had to be the Q&A session after he read, and this is only because David Sedaris is so witty and fast on his feet. The truth about David Sedaris is that he is arguably one of the best American humorists writing creative non-fiction today, but he has also been criticized for stretching the truth in his work.

The first time I heard anyone criticize David Sedaris for flouting the truth, it was a fellow writer whom I admire. She took issue with his dialogue, which she described as “too perfect to be real.” To me, this criticism seemed a little much. Who can remember exactly what another person said? In my own memoir, I’m writing about events that happened thirty years ago. Some dialogue stands out for me, but most of it doesn’t. I create an amalgamation of what I think my mother or father would have said, given the circumstances I’m writing about. I try to make it as vivid as possible. For a humorist, it’s no great leap to assume this same sort of thing about making the material as funny as possible. Wouldn’t that be the whole point of writing a humorous essay? So although I admire my friend’s writing, I chalked up her criticisms of Mr. Sedaris’s dialogue to envy or some other personal problem and moved on.

But then last year Alex Heard of The New Republic did a full on investigation on the factual truth of Mr. Sedaris’s work in a piece titled, This American Lie. Despite the shocking title, Mr. Heard didn’t find much. He reiterated my writer friend’s earlier complaint about the dialogue. If he discovered some embellishment here and some exaggeration there, Mr. Heard was quick to point out that none of the issues amounted to the same degree of problems other journalists (Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair) and memoirists (James Frey) have had with the truth. Mr. Heard fairly acknowledges that a tall tale done for the sake of humor is a credible defense. And I don’t believe he’s done a hatchet job. But I couldn’t help but feel amused at his seeming surprise that most of the Sedaris clan refused to meet with him. I was also delighted to discover that Lou Sedaris, the patriarch of the Sedaris family, who did agree to an interview, started off their relationship with a terse, “I’m not sure I like your agenda.” Of course the Sedaris family didn’t welcome Mr. Heard: He wasn’t just checking out a brother and son, he was investigating a humorist for being funny. Who wouldn’t have shied away?

No writer should be above scrutiny, but these days unearthing claims to legitimacy seems to be the clearest direction creative non-fiction is going. That’s a disturbing trend. Make no mistake, I do want to know if a memoirist claiming to be half white, half Native American foster child and Bloods gangster is actually a suburbanite from an upscale family. But I’m not sure every writer in the non-fiction aisle requires a full blown investigation.

This isn’t just about Alex Heard’s article, or David Sedaris’s humor. Even writers I admire look at the veracity of another writer’s non-fiction as simply a challenge, a flower waiting to be plucked. We writers should know better. If you’re a fiction writer, the reader’s game is to determine what might be real. If you’re writing non-fiction, the tables are turned and only the least cynical among us seems to take non-fiction at face value anymore. Witch hunting can’t be good for creative non-fiction.

Credibility is a precious coin; writers squander it at the peril of their own career. That goes for writers stretching the truth about their lives, but also for writers stretching my patience to its limits with unreasonable claims about an essayist that can so easily make me laugh.

And that’s the truth.