The way in which I think nonfiction tends to be dishonest most often
isn't ... simply making up lies.... I think, actually, that happens very
rarely. What happens much more often...is that the dishonesty comes
through omission.
What part of the story do you not tell? So my mother was part of a large
all-women's peace rally in September 2001 just before the bombing
campaign in Afghanistan began, after the World Trade Center attacks,
9/11. And there were thousands of women protesting, and a small group of
men came across and burned flags and chanted, "Death to America." And my
mother saw on the news channel this small group of men creating a
raucous. And the way these shots appeared it looked like it was all
these men burning flags and shouting. And the fact is there's a lot of
people around who assume that's what happened. That isn't a lie in the
sense that, yes, those men did do that thing, but the omission of the
fact that on that particular set of city streets, 95 percent of the
people were actually part of a peace rally and 5 percent or 10 percent
were part of this anti-American mob. If you don't say that, you've
committed an enormous dishonesty.