with the actual audience that the implied author has introduced a deficiency
into the narration.
(6) Deficient referential narration involves misreporting, misinterpreting,
and misevaluating about characters, places, and events referred to in non-
fiction narrative. In other words, deficient referential narration involves dis-
crepancies between the representation of extratextual reality in nonfiction
and that reality itself. Again, given reporting’s fundamental role in narrative,
the greatest deficiency involves misreporting. Deficiencies may be inadver-
tent or deceptive. Inadvertent deficiencies occur in situations where the author
intends to report, interpret, or evaluate the external reality accurately but fails
to do so. For example, an on-the-scene reporter of a developing news story
typically will seek to report everything as accurately as possible but because
of limited information may misreport, misinterpret, or misevaluate it. In cases
where that happens, the newscaster’s authorial audience is invited to accept
her account as reliable, but as the additional information comes in, the actual
audience will decline that invitation. Inadvertent deficiencies may have bond-
ing or estranging effects, depending on the reasons for the deficiency.
Deceptive deficiencies occur in cases such as James Frey’s A Million Lit-
tle Pieces, where the author deliberately misreports events and the authorial
audience is not supposed to detect the misreporting. Once the actual audi-
ence becomes aware of the deception—usually through one or more read-
ers comparing the author’s account to other evidence about the extratextual
reality—the actual audience will typically opt out of the authorial audience.
Deceptive deficiencies typically have estranging effects on the implied author–
actual audience relationship.
I conclude by returning to the deficient narration in The Year of Magi-
cal Thinking and its consequences. My earlier commentary on how we might
read the last part of the narrative if it were fiction is relevant here. But rather
than the implied Didion undermining the accuracy of the character narra-
tor’s perceptions, we have a situation in which the actual audience comes to
doubt whether the experiencing-I’s partial working through of her grief is as
successful as the implied author represents it. The actual audience recognizes
that the representation includes a remarkable shortcut: rather than face the big
question that the autopsy raises—how could John and I have forgotten about
the LAD?—the experiencing-I has evaded it, and the narrating-I and implied
author endorse the evasion.
Nevertheless, many members of the actual audience—and I include myself
among them—are likely to find that the deficient narration has bonding rather
than estranging effects. It functions as very powerful evidence of the depth of
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