SAM DINGMAN: Mark, we obviously take the truth pretty seriously around here.
MARK BRODIE: Of course.
DINGMAN: As well we should. But I read this essay that, stay with me, asked a provocative question about how to prioritize the truth. Isabel Ruehl is an assistant editor at Harper’s Magazine, but she started out as a fact checker. And in a recent piece for the website Lit Hub, Isabel wrote about a novel she read called "The Fact Checker."
BRODIE: This is getting a little meta.
DINGMAN: It is — but don’t worry, it all fits together. In writing about this novel, Isabel started thinking about how oddly specific the task of fact checking is, and how easy it is to get so caught up in those specificities and lose sight of the larger goal.
BRODIE: Which is something besides the truth?
DINGMAN: No no — it’s a bit more nuanced than that. We started our conversation with an example.
BRODIE: I’m so curious.
Full conversation
DINGMAN: (To Isabel Ruehl) You start the Lit Hub piece by talking about a sentence from one of the first pieces you ever fact checked at the magazine. And the sentence is, “I skirted and abandoned development of some kind, half built its windows, smashed wild dogs on its concrete foundation, barking at me to not come any closer.”
And one of the things you write about is that you were able to verify the idea that in Rome, where the piece was set, there were abandoned developments. You could see that some of them were half built and had smashed windows. But this question of whether or not there were wild dogs — that was the tricky bit of business, right?
ISABEL RUEHL: Exactly. I was coming up empty on whether or not there were wild dogs. Then I was thinking, “Well, maybe any sort of wildlife organization or something like that would have that information. Maybe some tourist offices would. Maybe people who travel to Rome have fear of dogs. And so there would be some sort of Reddit thread or something.”
But I remember just sort of searching around for a while, feeling like I wasn’t getting a satisfying yes or no. Specifically, she was describing walking a fairly short stretch from the airport to a nearby location. And it surprised me that my editor’s suggestion was to ask the airport. But of course that makes sense also because if the airport had to deal with dogs around there, they would know.
But yeah, that was sort of my last step of really trying to see whether there was a definitive answer.
DINGMAN: And there was not ultimately, right? The airport, as you write, was sort of confused by your phone call.
RUEHL: Exactly.
DINGMAN: But you and your editor reached the conclusion that it was OK to publish the piece without verifying the dogs, because you couldn’t prove that the writer did not see wild dogs.
RUEHL: Exactly.
DINGMAN: And ultimately, it seems like the subtext of that decision is that the inability to prove the existence of the wild dogs was not more important than the publication of the story that the writer was telling. Is it fair to say that that’s the calculation you’re running?
RUEHL: Yes. I think also trusting the writer, and the writer was a very reliable writer. So there are all those other considerations as well.
DINGMAN: But this, for me, builds towards this idea that I found really provocative in your Lit Hub piece, which was the notion that it’s possible that narrative nonfiction is a bit of an oxymoron.
RUEHL: Yeah. That was one of my favorite parts of this novel, which is what I write about. It’s called “The Fact Checker” by Austin Kelley. He’s a fact checker. The protagonist, but also the author of this book had been a fact checker at the New Yorker. There are all these moments where the main character exhibits sort of frustration about different literary decisions in the assignments that he’s tracking.
For example, there’s one writer who he says that he’s generally a very accurate writer. However, he tends to leave out large swaths of information to give his passages a certain atmosphere. And that was really interesting to me because on the one hand, all of writing is selection. You pick one word after the next. So you can’t really fault that writer.
But on the other hand, I take this narrator’s point that if you cherry pick to describe just a very small sliver of something, that’s not honest either. So there are so many gray areas, and I think that really comes to the fore in literary nonfiction.
DINGMAN: I had the sense — and tell me if I misunderstood — that for you reading that Austin Kelley novel, “The Fact Checker,” sort of brought you into confrontation with yourself about where the proper line on this is.
RUEHL: Yeah, I think it was, a very fun and helpful way to start confronting these questions.
DINGMAN: So just to give people a very brief summary in “The Fact Checker,” the fictional fact checker, gets told by someone who works at a green market that there is “nefarious business” happening at the farm where she works. And this fact checker ends up getting so obsessed with trying to verify that this nefarious business is happening, that he ends up going to visit the farm.
It turns out there is a cult operating on the farm, but the nefarious business is actually this sort of anodyne detail that the greens on the farm are not grown there, but rather in China. Right?
RUEHL: Pretty much.
DINGMAN: What is the message that you take away from that quest that the fact checker goes on?
RUEHL: I think there are many different ways to look at the quest. I think one part of it is that even though that is just a small phrase in this full essay that he’s fact checking, his drive to make sure that every single part is true is interesting, because I had a conversation with John Jeremiah Sullivan about this, where he thinks about how there is sort of a contractual relationship between the reader and the writer.
So if the reader understands that what they’re reading is nonfiction, it must be nonfiction. And if it turns out that something is false, then that whole structure crumbles. And I think that’s something that’s going on in this fact checker's quest.
DINGMAN: So if I’m hearing you right, you’re saying that what’s going on in this quest is that the eponymous fact checker in the novel is kind of being brought face to face with the line at which that contract potentially disappears, right?
RUEHL: So he finally gets to the bottom of this fact, but the deadline has already passed. And he goes to the top editor, and the top editor is pretty angry at him about that. And then shortly after that, his supervisor tells him that things just aren’t working out. And that’s probably partly because of that and partly because of his sort of crazy behavior leading up to that, just absolutely driven crazy by his pursuit of all these facts.
DINGMAN: Right. Right. And it seems like that journey leads you to a very interesting conclusion, which, as you write, is “Write the first draft of history” — which is the way people often talk about journalism — “but don’t get left behind.” What do you mean by that?
RUEHL: I was thinking about keep moving forward because you can go endlessly deep and get stuck on research. But I like that expression that journalism is the first draft of history.
