Jake Silverstein’s debut book, Nothing Happened and Then It Did: A Chronicle in Fact and Fiction, is a partly true, partly imagined chronicle of a young journalist’s attempt to find his first great story. This search takes Jake from the drought-ridden ranches of West Texas and Mexico, to a poetry contest in Reno, Nevada.
We’ll be hosting a signing on Wednesday, April 21st at 7PM. Jake was nice enough to answer a few questions about the book, the “truthiness” of our modern culture, and the allure of West Texas.
Currently, the publishing world is pretty strict with the line between fiction and non-fiction. Writers (like James Frey) can get serious repercussions for fudging the facts. But writers from the turn of the century,especially Mark Twain, were often known to embellish their anecdotes and “true stories”. Do you think our modern adherence to ‘absolute truth’ is a good or bad thing?
If only we really did have a modern adherence to absolute truth. What I find interesting is how over the past ten years or so, as we’ve seen this outbreak of fake memoirs, fraud journalism, and the hand-wringing and public apologies that go with them, we’ve also seen the rise of what Luc Sante calls “innumerable forms of extraliterary fiction.” He means the strange world of mass media–reality television, photoshopped magazine covers, lip synching, steroidal forty-year-olds hitting home runs, professional sports in general, etc–and also the increasing “truthiness,” as Colbert would say,of our politics. You know, James Frey could have taken the attitude of the anonymous Bush aide who memorably dismissed Ron Suskind and other reporters as members of “the reality-based community.” He gave Suskind that quote in 2004, a year after Frey’s book came out (and two years before it fell apart). “When we act,” that aide said, “we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality judiciously, as you will we’ll act again, creating other new realities.” It actually would have been kind of brilliant for Frey to have taken that pose when he went on Oprah, ridiculous as it would have been. I have no sympathy for Frey, but I do wonder if we all had so much fun eviscerating him because we couldn’t as easily eviscerate guys like the Bush aide who talked to Suskind.
Why did you choose to embellish your experiences with fiction? I won’t ask you which parts of the book are true and which aren’t, but what’s the percentage? 50/50…90/10?
The book is half fiction and half non-fiction, as labeled in the table of contents. But this only partly answers the question, since the fictional chapters involve real places, and arise from my own experiences in the world. So, like all fictional works, they’re not entirely fictional. As for the non-fiction chapters, they are factual and have been officially verified by a fact-checker and all that. But like all narrative non-fiction their correspondence to reality “as it happened” is not so simple. Life is not a narrative. It’s far too complex, random, and meaningless. So writers of narrative non-fiction (and even writers of news journalism) have to choose what details of a scene to record and how to and sort them and emphasize them in ways that suit the demands of narrative, which has it’s own formal rules about pacing and rhythm and so forth. You do this without ever losing sight of the fact that you are describing real people and real situations and have a solemn obligation to those people–and to your reader–never to invent facts. But you also maintain an awareness of the transmutation that’staking place as you render these selected, sorted details into a story that is told in language. What you end up with is never a full-scale map of exactly what happened.
The other thing I’d say is that voice is a murky area of the whole fact/fiction question. Writers choose words and tones and rhetorical moves that correspond to whatever personae they are, wittingly or not, trying to assume. And I completely reject the idea that any writer is free of a persona. The simple act of writing your byline involves the creation of a persona. A writer’s persona is simply the aspect of the writer’s self that is presented to or perceived by the reader. And again, what the writer presents and what the reader perceives is never a full-scale map of the self.
What is it about Marfa and far west Texas that gives it such a strange and eerie allure?
West Texas in general is an interesting place. The land is so vast and so unforgiving that certain kinds of people are attracted to living there–people who can deal with being at the mercy of the elements, people who are okay with deep solitude, people who have good, dry senses of humor, people who are self-reliant but also generous, and people who are a little weird in one way or another. It’s a dwarfing place. You get dwarfed by the big spaces every time you so much as drive to the next town over. Personally I like getting dwarfed like this. I think it’s probably good for the soul. I don’t get dwarfed nearly enough living in Austin.
One thing I really enjoyed about the format of your book was reading something I thought must be fake, and then finding it’s at least somewhat true. I actually imdb’d Rigg Kennedy because I loved your description of him so much. As a writer/ journalist do you seek out people like Rigg or Northcutt? How do you recognize those larger than life characters?
I love it that the book sent you to Google. That’s excellent. Rigg is an interesting guy. We’re Facebook friends now. Most narrative journalists are looking for characters who are a little nutty, very passionate, verbally intriguing, and full of conviction about whatever their thing is. So I don’t think this is some unique taste on my part. But the important realization for me as a journalist–and I think this is something I figured out doing newspaper work in Marfa–is that you can usually find some if not all of those qualities in anybody. It’s all a matter of how much time you’re willing to spend looking and how you look.
Most of the stories in this book take place around the start of the decade. You’re publishing them almost 10 years later. Did these stories/experiences need time to come together or was it just a matter of finding someplace to publish them?
I write very slowly and revise a lot, so it took a long while for me to finish everything. Especially because I was perplexed by how to make the fiction and the non-fiction fit together. Toward the end of this process I had a full-time job and a child, which made things go even more slowly.
Does the Devil live in West Texas?
Almost certainly.
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