CHAPTER 3
Probability in Fiction and Nonfiction
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND
THE YEAR OF MAgICAL THINKINg67I
N THIS CHAPTER, I extend the discussion of probability from chapter 2,
even as I shift the purpose of that discussion. Having established that
authors often construct their narratives in light of their sense of their audi-
ence’s unfolding responses, I now take up the issue of how rhetorical theo-
ry’s privileging of authors and audiences over textual phenomena provides
the basis for an intervention in the debate about the distinction between fic-
tion and nonfiction. More specifically, I focus on how authors and audiences
approach issues of probability in one way in fiction and in a distinctively dif-
ferent way in nonfiction. These differences depend on both a shared under-
standing of the purposes and appropriate means of fiction and nonfiction and
on how particular authors deploy that understanding in relation to particular
projects. I come at these issues through some observations about the phenom-
enon of fraudulent memoirs.
In the world of creative nonfiction, the first two decades of the twenty-
first century will likely be known as the Age of the Fraudulent Memoir. With
James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, Matt McCarthy’s Odd Man Out, Marga-
ret B. Jones’s Love and Consequences, and several other books, we have wit-
nessed an all-too-familiar narrative of reception. Chapter 1: Initial reviewers
and readers enthusiastically praise the memoir as an affectively powerful and
ethically rewarding performance; they use adjectives such as intense, lacerat-
ing, eye-opening, humane, and deeply affecting. Chapter 2: Skeptics and fact-