Letter from the editor.

Among my many guilty pleasures are movies about teachers inspiring students. No matter how bad they are, no matter how made-for-TV they might be, I'll cheer each one on until the end. One of the best is Stand and Deliver, which dramatizes the true story of Jamie Escalante, a math teacher in East Los Angeles. At the end of the movie, statistics fade in and out on a black screen, showing how the number of students passing the AP calculus exam increased each year. It's a great story, made all the more powerful because it's true.

I also love Dead Poet's Society. At the end of the movie, as the boys stand on their desks proclaiming "O Captain! my Captain!" well ... any sense of cool I try to maintain goes out the window. And it doesn't matter that it's not a true story--it's a great story and, for me, an inspiring one.

I think that, as a culture, we too often view true stories as being more powerful than fiction. With books, our preference for authenticity can not only improperly limit the books we choose to read but affect the books that get produced. Publishers feel that many readers prefer the memoir to the novel, and the concept of "a true story" is a powerful marketing hook. An author tour may seem more compelling when you can trot out the person to whom the events you read about actually happened.

The author's and the publisher's zeal to meet the demands of the cultural marketplace (book sales, talk shows) has led us to recent false memoirs--from James Frey's A Million Little Pieces to the most recent Love and Consequences by Margaret B. Jones. That author is actually Margaret Seltzer, who instead of running drugs with gangs in South-Central Los Angeles, attended a private Episcopal day school in North Hollywood.

Perhaps if this "memoir" had been categorized properly as fiction, it might have done well. But the siren call of proclaiming it as true was too much to resist--both for the author and the publisher.

Truth is vital and powerful, but when it comes to entertainment, I think we're demanding too much of it. Our demand is human nature--from the people who "only read nonfiction" (as if that covered all they would need in life) to the culture at large that creates heroes of celebrities only to tear them apart by revealing the banal reality of their lives. We congratulate ourselves on our quest for authenticity, but it limits us. Strange as it may sound, fiction can affect, inspire, and inform us in ways reality cannot. Let's let fiction do its job.

Best,

Jon

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