True Lies

By BEN GREENMAN - The New York Times - Published: March 15, 2013

In January, two California men, a political consultant and a professional chef, filed suit against Lance Armstrong and his publishers after his interview with Oprah Winfrey, in which he confessed to blood doping and using other performance-enhancing drugs during his Tour de France championship spree. In their complaint, the litigants claimed they would not have purchased Armstrong’s autobiographies “It’s Not About the Bike” (2000) and “Every Second Counts” (2003) had they known that the books were built on a foundation of lies. Any inspirational messages contained within, they alleged, were communicated with a flagrant disregard for truth. Armstrong’s stories of training vigilantly and succeeding as a result grossly misrepresented actual circumstance. Moreover, the lawsuit suggested, the two books were categorically dishonest: they were marketed as nonfiction when they were, it turns out, fictitious.

Illustration by Emily Flake

In the wake of that lawsuit, I am filing a grievance of my own against the publishers of more than a thousand novels. As I explain in my formal complaint, these books commit a crime every bit as insidious as that perpetrated by Armstrong. These “novels” (I can hardly type the word without quaking with rage) are marketed as fiction when they blatantly contain elements of truth. In a memorable moment in Armstrong’s interview with Winfrey, he said he had looked up the word “cheat” in the dictionary. Well, I have looked up the word “fiction,” and here is what the dictionary says: “Prose literature, especially short stories and novels, about imaginary events and people.” Creating works of this nature is noble, I have always believed. I still believe it at some level. Yet when delving into many of the novels I own — novels I bought with hard-earned money and sometimes even recommend to friends — I find they fly in the face of this definition.

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