4CHICAGO READER | JANUARY 20, 2006 | SECTION ONE
[email protected] Hot Type www.chicagoreader.com/hottype Truthiness in Advertising The uninflated life is not worth living. By Michael Miner ucky are the people who can talk about their lives as if L they were actually interest- ing. People lacking this gift are obliged to lead lives that truly are, often at great personal risk and inconvenience. Or they can settle for being bores. James Frey has the gift, and it’s bedazzled literary types such as his publisher, Nan Talese, and his popularizer, Oprah Winfrey. For them his “truthi- ness” will suffice—to apply the American Dialect Society’s word of the year: “the quality of pre- ” ferring concepts or facts one “ wishes to be true, rather than truth concepts or facts known to be true.” A truthy life is the life most people live, even the raconteurs. Especially the raconteurs. Wherever a truthy life runs thin on content, it’s spackled with confabulation. Pulitzer-winning historian Joseph Ellis lived most truthily. Until the facts were clarified a few years ago, it was under- stood around Mount Holyoke Winfrey could have taken him fashioned true-false test admin- As a teenage ambulance driver Hemingway lived in a different College, where he taught, that under their wing and given his istered by thesmokinggun.com. in World War I, Ernest time, a time when he could call he’d been a paratrooper in nightmare a chance to galvanize Doubleday, which produces the Hemingway was hit in the leg by his books novels and people Vietnam and served on the staff the nation.