Comments on The 3% Solution

I'm SHOCKED! SHOCKED! that David Sedaris' memoirs are embellished! All this time I thought they were direct, third-party, transcriptions from a video tape of every waking moment of his life.

So he didn't REALLY french kiss a teenage goat? What is literature coming to?

Jesus, seriously? The book stores I go to always have this stuff under "Notes and Letters" anyhow. Also, bookstores are arranged by crazy people.

And I heard that frog in Calaveras County couldn't really jump that high! The whole thing was lies lies lies!

Maybe Barnes and Noble should just start a "Damn Dirty Lies" section for anything not fully verified by scholars at Oxford University.

From the Sunday Times:

“Naked,” for instance, has a story “where my mother hits a cat with her car, and the cat dies, and the cat comes back to life and says, ‘You killed me,’ ” Sedaris said. Speaking of [journalist Alex] Heard, he added, “That’s what he was fact-checking, that book.”

MMM>>> naked juice and sleeping in late in the evening with a good book and a molotov highball... sounds D_LISH.

Fiction?! Horrors! What's a more appropriate categorization? Home Improvement? Etiquette?

Borders is doing the same thing.

Sister Amy has been making fun of David's little embellishments for years...though his depiction of HER seems completely accurate.

AND...Mr Sedaris is far less entertaining writing as a rich, privledged, Normandy dwelling, ex-smoker, drinker and stoner than when he was a poor schlub, cleaning toilets and getting wasted everyday...

The new book is...o.k. but it's no Barrel Fever.

so can we put Napoleon's war diaries and Columbus's Journal in the fiction section now too?

No one could write a memoir that topped 97% if they tried. I think 67% is a more likely goal. Memories are lies we tell ourselves to make the story better. Sedaris's books are at least as factual as Simon Schama's.

"Memories are lies we tell ourselves to make the story better."

That was lovely Fnarf.

@12

Second.

George Macdonald Fraser's tales of his days in the Gordon Highlanders were, by his own admission, roughly the same proportion of non-fiction to fiction, but have been classified as fiction since their publication some 35 years ago. This is not a new phenomenon.

...this is all oprah's fault. stupid stupid stupid.

Good. Can women start thinking for themselves now or will they still need Oprah?

What a joke.

ugh. my vah-jay-jay's hurtin'.

All stories are true. Some of them actually happen.

Borders has always shelved Sedaris under Fiction/Literature. It's not a big deal.