I recently tried to listen to Benjamin Banneker and Us. The premise was interesting. A family finds out that they were related to Benjamin Banneker, a famous Black man in the 1700s. This family is white. They realize that along the way their branch of the family had started passing as white and now several generations later, the family didn’t even know that that was part of their history.
I guessed from the description that they got in contact with other branches of the family. The book was going to examine the way each of them experienced race through the generations. Ok, I was interested.
But, it started with a description of Benjamin writing a letter to Thomas Jefferson. The letter is real. However, the book describes him stretching. It talks about him taking a walk around his farm after writing it and how he felt about it. None of that was supported by any documentation that he left. It was straight up historical fiction.
I don’t have anything against historical fiction but this is labeled a nonfiction book.
Later in the book she started describing the day in the life of another ancestor. At least this time she prefaced it with saying something like, “I like to imagine her…” to distinguish it from what was supposed to be factual.
The author talks in the book about considering herself a writer of “creative nonfiction.” I don’t think I like that concept. I want my nonfiction to backed up by facts. If you want to be getting all creative feel free to write some very well researched historical fiction. I want there to be a firm line between the two.
I’m not even terribly comfortable with historical fiction that puts made up words in the mouth of real people, to be honest. I feel like it gives a false sense of who these people were. I’m more comfortable with historical fiction with an entirely made up cast.
I also don’t like movies that are “based on true events”. Nope, either give me something entirely made up or a documentary. No in between.
Is it just me? Does this bother anyone else?
Between this blurring of fiction and nonfiction and the fact that I was over an hour into the audiobook and she kept going on tangents about teaching writing that didn’t seem to relate to the main storyline, I DNFed this book. It’s a bad sign when I’m yelling, “Get to the point, woman!” in my car.
Yes! I really dislike fiction books about real people (or even when real people get into fiction books in any but the most tangential way) – I’d rather read nonfiction about them with proper research!
I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that’s Creative Nonfiction but I agree with you on all the points you made.
You make an interesting point! I actually love historical fiction based on true events with real people. For me it’s a great way to learn things while enjoying a story. Of course history will be more true to what really happend. But in the end history is, as the word indicates, also a “story” about the past. Historians use the facts available to them and interpret them in certain ways. It’s clearly different than writing fiction. But I do see similarities and it’s probably the reason why I like history.