You Can (See) Read Everything

Former Scarsdale resident Mark Gompertz spent five decades in the publishing industry, shaping stories and guiding authors across a wide range of genres. As an editor and publisher, he has worked with bestselling and award-winning writers, bringing compelling narratives to life. He recently launched “Still Turning Pages” on Substack, and here is an installment.

The Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim film, YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING is already a cultural phenomenon and box office hit, that had theater exhibitors, in its second week, scrambling to find additional screens by booting out unsuccessful movies (sorry SOCIAL RECKONING.) And while it is ostensibly a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes—talk about unreliable narrators--it really examines our complicated relationship with truth and the broader cultural struggles with misinformation.

Some would say that we have been living in a Post Truth era for the past decade. But twenty years ago, Stephen Colbert famously discussed “truthiness,” with the line: “Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. “Going back further, Oscar Wilde wrote: “The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.”

In the book world, truth isn’t dead. It’s just having trouble finding a publisher. Increasingly there are questions about authenticity. Can we trust what we are shown or told? It seems like every week, we are reading about the struggles publishers have trying to determine whether the author wrote the book or was it generated by AI. This past summer, Jerry Falade’s thriller CALL ME, I’LL HIDE THE BODY attracted enormous interest from major publishers. But his agents withdrew the manuscript because they said they could no longer authenticate its development. Earlier this month, WIRED reported that employees at major publishing houses described AI being used behind the scenes for marketing copy,publicity, cover design, and other publishing functions, sometimes without disclosure. So, you have an industry demanding authenticity from writers while facing questions about its own transparency.

Early on, when I started out working in book publishing, I naively asked a Senior Editor where the fact checking department was. My older colleague smiled and said that we are not a news organization. We rely on the author to research facts with editors, copyeditors, and sometimes lawyers querying the writer on things that stick out. And so, it has been for decades.

Of all the genres of books that seem to draw comparisons to what the film is shedding light on, it is memoirs and authorized autobiographies. These tell-alls seem to shout out: “Trust me. This happened to me.” In 1971, writer Clifford Irving convinced publisher McGraw Hill that he had secretly collaborated with reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes on his authorized biography. Irving produced forged letters and documents purportedly from Hughes, some of which passed handwriting authentication. The publisher agreed to pay $750,000 ( a huge amount in those times.) A year later, Hughes broke his long public silence to deny knowing Irving or authorizing the book, which was exposed as fabrication. Irving eventually confessed, pleaded guilty to fraud and went to prison. Although the autobiography never went on sale, Irving’s account of how he deceived McGraw Hill, THE HOAX, became a bestseller in 1981.

In 2003, Doubleday published James Frey’s A MILLION LITTLE PIECES, a memoir recounting his struggles with addiction and criminal behavior. Oprah Winfrey selected it for her book club in 2005, turning it into a huge bestseller. But in 2006, the investigative website, The Smoking Gun, revealed that Frey had fabricated portions of his story. Frey acknowledged embellishing his account and the publisher subsequently added an author’s note to future editions. The scandal sparked a national debate over the truthfulness of memoirs and publishers’ responsibility to verify nonfiction.

Last year, the Dial Press published THE TELL, a memoir by Amy Griffin describing childhood sexual abuse she said she remembered decades later during MDMA—assisted therapy. The book became a bestseller. The New York Times, ran an investigative piece raising questions about the reliability of the author’s account. The case exposes a longstanding tension between the credibility a publisher confers on a memoir and its reliance on authors to verify their accounts. Publisher Whitney Frick was quoted in the article saying, “Book publishers are not investigators. This is Amy’s story. We trust her, and all of our authors, that they are recounting their memories truthfully.”

Perhaps the real lesson isn’t that we’ve entered a post-truth era, but that truth has always been more elusive than we cared to admit. Clifford Irving invented a story. James Frey embellished one. A major newspaper casts a shadow on someone’s story resulting in doubts about their reliability. And now AI can produce stories without anyone having lived them at all.

The technology may be new, but the dilemma isn’t. Publishers have always asked readers to believe what they publish. The question now is whether readers will continue to believe them.

Which raises one final question: How do you know I actually wrote this?

Find Mark Gompertz on Substack here.