Word: authorly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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What set Morris off on his risky, semi-fictional path? The author was seriously late in delivering his book and anguished about writer's block and his inability to get to the core of Reagan. Perhaps it was the arrogance of the intellectual who cannot make himself believe that a person with an ordinary mind can be a powerful leader. Perhaps it was the need do something different with Reagan's life, to justify the big advance and the long delay in producing the book...
...writer's job, Morris observes, is different from the actor's in that the author tries to remember backward, to turn experience into a literary account. "To the actor, only artifice is actual," Morris writes. Unfortunately in this book, Morris has switched roles...
...couple of minutes in all, but a baffling one that squares with neither history nor Orwell's vision. Who are these interlopers? The Czars? Boris Yeltsin? The IMF? It's not clear. But surely the implication--that the masses' self-rule was a foolish aberration--is not one the author, who nearly died fighting for democracy in the Spanish Civil War, would have considered a feel-good send...
Because fact can have far more influence than fiction. How else to explain Fragments by Binjamin Wilkomirski, a harrowing, much celebrated Holocaust memoir, which turns out to have been fabricated? The author's real name is Bruno Doesseker. He is not a child survivor of Majdanek, the son of Latvian Jews murdered in the Holocaust. He is Swiss, the son of a Protestant single mother. He never saw the Holocaust. (He claims his Holocaust memory was recalled while he was in therapy...
...what is truth, anyway? The new Reagan biography features a fictional character, bearing the author's name (Edmund Morris) but with a fabricated past, who encounters Reagan at various junctures. Fiction--with supporting footnotes, no less--in the authorized biography of a living President...