does not lead any readers to feel betrayed by Brontë in the way that so many
felt betrayed by James Frey.
These considerations lead to a definition of literary nonfiction narrative
parallel to Rader’s definition of the novel: a work that offers the reader a rep-
resentation of actual people and events that is simultaneously responsible to
their existence outside the textual world and shaped in the service of some
underlying authorial purpose designed to give the people and events a the-
matic, affective, and ethical significance and force that would not be apparent
without such shaping. This conception means that literary nonfiction operates
with a different relationship between freedom and constraint than the novel
does. The author of literary nonfiction is free to shape the characters and
events into his or her vision of their thematic, affective, and ethical signifi-
cance within the limits imposed by the necessary responsibility to the extra-
textual existence of those characters and events. This conception of nonfiction
also means that we do not read it with the double consciousness operating
in our reading of fiction, and, thus, we do not need to invoke a narrative
audience distinct from the authorial audience. Furthermore, because we do
not read with such a double-consciousness, the default assumption—one that
operates until the implied author signals that it does not apply—is that the
“narrating-I” is a reliable representative of the implied author.
As we have seen in chapter 2’s discussion of the crossover between textual
and readerly dynamics in Stitches, this relationship between freedom and con-
straint in nonfiction does not necessarily entail a strict one-to-one correspon-
dence between extratextual realities and narrative representations of them.
Instead, it involves a constant negotiation between the twin demands of ref-
erentiality and the communication of thematic, affective, and ethical signifi-
cance. This point in turn sheds light on the problem with fraudulent memoirs.
In most of these cases, the authors become so enamored of their visions of the
larger thematic, affective, and ethical purpose of the narrative that they no
longer observe the constraint of being responsible to the extratextual existence
of the characters and events. They buy into the temptation of inventing events
because “they make for a better story”—where “better” means “more vivid,
more deeply affecting, more thematically powerful.” By sacrificing responsibil-
ity to the extratextual dimensions of their narratives on the altar of heightened
effects, authors of fraudulent memoirs construct narratives that are deficient
in their ethics of the telling. In these cases, the authors are not constructing
“probable impossibilities or plausibilities” but inventing events that have no
basis in the extratextual raw materials of their narratives.
This rhetorical conception of the fiction-nonfiction distinction under-
lies my strong claim that our tacit readerly assumptions often lead us to
72 • CHAPTER 3