As most devoted readers of memoir know, there has been considerable hubbub in recent years over the genre's methodology, truthfulness and "creative liberties." As one who has strong views on the subject, I could go on for a couple thousand words laying out my diatribe, but I'm not in the mood today to raise my blood pressure. Instead, I'll share an amazingly simple device that will let any nonfiction writer be as "creative" with factual accuracy and documentation as he or she wishes. I encountered it recently in A Clearing in the Distance, Witold Rybczynski's 1999 biography of the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted.

On page 70, Rybczynski, the author of 11 books and a professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania, takes some creative liberties with strict factual accuracy—but he has enough respect for his readers and the conventions of nonfiction to tell his readers, in a concise introductory paragraph, that he is about to do so. What follows is a few pages of italicized type in which the author imagines some part of Olmsted's life. He repeats the technique more than a half-dozen additional times throughout the biography.

Here is Rybczynski's little introductory note in its entirety:

   Author's note: I have not taken liberties with Olmsted's biography; his words
   are his own, his opinions are those that he expressed to others, usually in
   letters.Yet I also want to see the world through his eyes. The vignette that
   follows—and there will be others—is based on material evidence; Olmstead was
   writing a letter on that night and it was stormy. His thoughts and feelings are
   of course, imagined.

Were they used more widely, such simple notes of authorial intention would accomplish a number of things. They'd briskly move the poor reader of nonfiction off the quicksand of undeclared "creative liberties" onto solid ground—at least in the sense of knowing what the author's up to. Those of us who enjoy the play of imagination and believe that experimentation and form-pushing is a vital part of the literary lifeblood might well say, "Thanks for letting me know—now go nuts!" The writer would be freed do what he or she damn well pleases with the material. And we would all be spared the whining of creative nonfiction fictionalists who want to have it both ways and keep their readers guessing.

--Ron Kovach, senior editor 

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