Truthful Lies Within Notes

As a reader of John D’Agata’s and a student in a creative nonfiction class, I do find it a bit hard to take in the truth of D’Agata’s note section at the close of his story, About a Mountain. Though it is arguable that this piece can be treated as a piece of fiction as he admits to the fabrication and alteration of information within the text, I still believe that this book merits classification as creative nonfiction. I say this because authors within this genera must create a story of truth meanwhile being allowed to insert their creativity and authorial intent so that they may give their readers a factual story through their own personal lends.

Since we all have our own persevered notions and ideals of a particular topic, I believe that D’Agata, like Joe Moran allows his interpretation of words to structure the thoughts of his audience. By combining characters, as D’Agata admits to in his Note section, he does not take from the truth of this story, but combines these characters to serve as one entity. By doing this D’Agata uses one person to portraying the image of L. A. as they would have as separate character.

Say D’Agata never inserted his note section within About a Mountain,to later find out that this book has fabrication and minor tweaking to characters, events, or even the information within the various lists D’Agata provides us with, then I would not believe this to be a work of creative nonfiction. Since D’Agata adds this to his book he is admitting to his audience, such as Slater in her memoir, Lying that though this story has minor occlusion, it still merits truth in the meaning derived from authorial intent. The intent here is to make public, the destruction of nuclear waste and to pose the question of how best to dispose of such a toxin. Presenting the audience/readers with this knowledge first hand, is more authentic than figuring out later that this story has a few alterations. If this note section had not been included, D’Agata’s

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