Lies and the Liars Who Tell Them

I’m reading The Fabulist by Stephen Glass. Talk about an unreliable narrator; I’m ¾ of the way through the book and I haven’t gained any insight at all regarding his experience. OK, so he fell apart when he was first found out. Uh huh, I get it that his book is a novel not a memoir (and heaven forbid we confuse or conflate the two). But still. Give me a reason to finish this book!

As Mr. Glass tells it, he wrote his fictionalized articles, passed them off as based in fact, and went along his merry way creating and writing and writing and creating, without much thought about it until he got caught. But isn’t telling a web of elaborate lies more complicated than that? Isn’t the liar afraid all the time that she will be discovered? Isn’t he terrified that someone will see one miniscule loose thread hanging, and pull?

I understand that some create their own version of reality, and really believe it. I see this in cases I work on – someone has told herself the same version of the same story so many times that she really believes the story she’s telling. But lying in the written word seems different than lying in life. Not to say better or worse, but just different. If you lie to your friends, your loved ones, the barista at your local coffee shop, it seems to me you’d have to constantly monitor and track what information you give to whom, and remember it. Then you would have to run interference between those people, because if they compare stories with each other, you could be found out. But to essentially write fiction and publish it as truth—why and how did Mr. Glass think no one would ever know?

Once published, the writer has zero control over the product. You can’t monitor where that information goes, and try to control what other information follows. Sure, people may want to believe what they read. Yes, when you earn someone’s trust at the outset it may be easier to deceive that person later. But to falsify sources and invent events, and then to put that information in a magazine article and try to pass it off as the truth, well, I'm on page 219 and I still wonder: what were you thinking?