Talk:What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng
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[edit] "Loosely based...
I have edited your additions, particularly the word "loosely." By calling it a "novel" the reader knows it is fiction. Yet as revealed by the book's short preface, Eggers spent several years interviewing Deng. "I told my story orally to the author," Deng writes. "He then concocted this novel, approximating my own voice and using the basic events of my life as the foundation." I think using the term "loosely" is misleading.
In this manner, "What Is the What" is a kind of nonfiction novel, like Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood," or (an albeit, ghost-written) memoir, like Eggers' AHWOSG.
As Gore Vidal stated in his own memoir: "a memoir is how one remembers one's own life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts double-checked." --D-Looth 19:49, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
