In Brendan Kiley's marvelous review of Roberto Bolaño's 900-page novel 2666, he wrote:

Bolaño finished 2666 against the deadline of his own death. His liver was rotting from hepatitis C, which he contracted from a dirty needle while he was a young heroin addict, Trotskyite, and vagabond who had fled his native Chile after being jailed by the Pinochet regime.

When Kiley's piece appeared in the print edition of The Stranger last month, a portion of those two sentences—the heroin part—was turned into that page's pullquote (that's jargon for the line or two we pull out of an article and publish in big letters somewhere on the page to make it look nicer and draw your attention).

Turns out that heroin stuff might not be true. Take it away, NYT:

His widow, from whom he was separated at the time of his death, and Andrew Wylie, the American agent she recently hired after distancing herself from Mr. Bolaño’s friends, editors and publisher, are now challenging part of that image. They dispute the idea, originally suggested by Mr. Bolaño himself, endorsed by his American translator and mentioned in several of the rapturous recent reviews of “2666” in the United States, that he ever “had a heroin habit,” that his death was “traceable to heroin use” or even that he had “an acquaintance with heroin.”

Oh, and that stuff about Chile might not be true either.

In interviews by telephone from Spain and Mexico, Mr. Bolaño’s friends and associates suggested that he... embraced ambiguity. “He created his own myth,” said the woman with whom the writer was romantically involved at the time of his death, but who asked that her name not be published because she wants to preserve her privacy. “Nobody can deny that he played that game, and he would be the first to admit it.”

I love you, Roberto Bolaño. You have created a puzzle that's going to be impossible to solve: your own biography.