When John D'Agata sent The Believer "What Happens There," an essay exploring the character of Las Vegas through the prism of one teenage boy's suicide, he informed them he'd taken some liberties with the facts. Jim Fingal, a fact checker with the magazine, took on the task of finding out just how much D'Agata had manipulated the story. The process began easily enough: Tackling D'Agata's opening sentence, FIngal confirmed the date of Levi Presley's death and the height of the building he jumped from. When he came upon a reference to "thirty-four licensed strip clubs in Vegas," though, he couldn't find independent verification--in fact, D'Agata's own research notes gave a different number. So Fingal emailed D'Agata looking for clarification, eventually receiving the explanation that "the rhythm of 'thirty-four' works better in that sentence... so I changed it."

And so it went, for seven years: Fingal pressing on each factual discrepancy, and D'Agata arguing in favor of a more artistic interpretation of his subject. The Lifespan of a Fact is a book where the marginal notes rise up and overwhelm the "main" text, to riveting Character Approved effect. D'Agata doesn't always come off especially well in the debate; his constant explanations that he's not a journalist, and just "trying to write something that's interesting to read," can seem defensive. Fingal's frustration is entirely understandable: "What exactly gives you the authority to introduce half-baked legend as fact and sidestep questions of facticity?" he demands during one of their biggest blowups. (D'Agata's immediate answer--"it's called art, d---head"--doesn't particularly help his cause.)

"What we're dancing around here is the idea of a moral responsibility in nonfiction," D'Agata argues, explaining that "the moment we start judging a form of art in terms of its 'moral value' is the moment we stop talking about art. Just by having this conversation and raising these issues we are disenfranching nonfiction as literature." Fingal is not obtuse to this argument: "I understand that art without resonance is boring," he says. "But this is a place where you're inserting 'significance'... You're threading Levi's life through a needle that you're constructing."