Last week was not a great week for journalists or book people. For those of us who fancy ourselves a bit of both, it was particularly trying. An Australian newspaper published several stories questioning some facts in the bestselling boy-soldier memoir, A Long Way Gone: according to the paper, sources in Sierra Leone dispute some of the key dates in the memoir, which suggests that author Ishmael Beah may have misrepresented the time he spent as a boy soldier. Beah issued a statement in which he passionately stood by his story and pointed to two Sierra Leonean sources who vouched for his chronology and character. Beah and one of his supporters have suggested that the Australian newspaper has an “agenda,” and that when an earlier claim that Beah's father was still alive, investigated by the paper, turned up false, the reporters looked for other discrepancies. The Australian has countered that Beah and his publisher have been evasive and that their explanations have introduced “several further errors” and do not acknowledge that his account is “seriously flawed.”
It might be impossible to determine whether Beah's horrific story began in 1993, as he claims, or in 1995, as the Australian's sources contend. “A lot of us do not know our own childhoods,” another boy soldier told the Australian, perhaps undercutting his own doubts about Beah's chronology. “We were fed drugs all the time and we were very, very young... when you lose your family there is nobody to tell you things like your age.”
Obviously, this is distressing on every level. On the one hand, I can't help championing the right of journalists to search for “the truth.” On the other hand—and I say this not because I have close personal relationships with Beah's publisher Crichton and his agent, Ira Silverberg—A Long Way Gone is likely not the result of some collusion or misrepresentation. At worst, Crichton, who has worked as a co-writer on such complicated tales as Marianne Pearl's A Mighty Heart, took as true the word of a boy whose experience is not in doubt: even the Australian's reporters have been careful to say they're not questioning the essential truths of Beah's time as a brainwashed, drugged-out killer and eventual refugee.
In this country, it's commonly known in the publishing industry that memoirs—even post—James Frey—are not stringently fact-checked; at most, they're submitted to legal departments looking for libel. Writers are responsible for their facts, and editors for probing their writers' hearts and souls and memories. In the case of A Long Way Gone, however, an excerpt (including the now-disputed dates) was fact-checked by the New York Times last January. “The fact-checking, as often happens, turned up a few discrepancies that were resolved without undermining the plausibility of his account,” Times spokesperson Diane C. McNulty said in an e-mail.
There are questions to be asked, again, about the nature of memoir and the responsibility of a publisher. Because no single person's memory can ever be completely verified, it might do for publishers to routinely issue disclaimers about character or chronology conflation. But I can't help noting what the controversy swirling around A Long Way Gone says about the competitive relationship between the book business and journalism and the essential purpose of “the truth.” Whether Beah was 13 or 15 when his story began, his work has opened the world's eyes to horrifying truths that no one—publisher, newspaper, reader—can ever dispute.
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