Unfortunately, as Megan notes, it’s not completely clear what Wallace did or didn’t do in this particular piece. As such, it seems to me that there are still things to learn from Wallace’s approach to structuring “Shipping Out,” which Megan addresses so eloquently here.

And for those of us still alive and writing, I think it’s vital that we get it down accurately and tell it true. You don’t get to plump your quotes. You don’t get to embellish. As soon as you do, it might still be a highly-entertaining story, but it’s not nonfiction, and it’s not journalism.

What’s difficult here, though, is how vague Franzen is in his assertion. Ordinarily, of course, “those things didn’t actually happen” would be a huge, horrible, wholesale blow to a work of nonfiction. In his conversation with Remnick, though, it’s unclear what kind of accusation Franzen’s actually making. He’s being coy; “didn’t actually happen,” weirdly, could mean any number of things in this context. (Alterman’s assessment — that Franzen “told Remnick that Wallace felt free to make stuff up for his non-fiction” — strikes me as not fully fair as a standalone summary of the exchange. The conversation, as I read it, was a lot more garbled and hedge-y than that.)

Not that there isn’t reason for skepticism. As The Awl’s piece points out (per a 1998 DFW interview with Tom Scocca), Wallace admitted to re-writing dialogue “so it sounds more out-loud, which I think means putting in some ‘likes’ or taking out some punctuation that the person might originally have said.” Which is either skirting the line or crossing it, as you prefer. But in another conversation, about another essay, Wallace insists that “Nothin’, nothin’ in there is made up.” Which would indicate both appreciation of journalistic principles and indignation at the suggestion that he’s violated them.

So it’s a murky thing, all in all, and pretty much a he-said/she-said at this point (with one of the participants, of course, no longer able to speak for himself). Based on the information we have at the moment, though, I’m inclined to take “Shipping Out” at its word: that it is a work of nonfiction, and thus a work of journalism. And a remarkable one, at that.

Does Jonathan Franzen’s assertion that some amount of the cruise story was invented(http://arts.nationalpost.com/2011/10/10/jonathan-franzen-dishes-on-david-foster-wallace/) change your view of the piece? It is still wonderfully written, and probably an accurate summation of his experience, but what if it was not all true?

(And bonus points for using terms related to a ship’s movement on the water as sub-heads within the piece. You devil you.)