‘The Lifespan of a Fact’ — Fun Words, Now Playing in Berkeley

Christina came to town this weekend to compete in the Westwords crossword (yes, crossword) tournament in Berkeley tomorrow.

I like it when my daughter comes to visit, so I scrambled around for something to keep her entertained and, I hoped, wanting to come back.

And there it was on the Visit Berkeley website: the first night of previews of “The Lifespan of a Fact,” a rolickingly good time of a play inspired by the book of the same name.

The play makes good fun of a stand-off between essayist John D’Agata and a young copy checker, Jim Fingal, who was assigned to verify the many iffy facts in D’Agata’s essay about a teenage suicide in Las Vegas.

Good natured but dead serious, the play raises questions that writers of nonfiction are constantly asking themselves and each other — how faithful must a memoirist or essayist be to the facts?

I write essays — hundreds of them are posted on this website — but before I was an essayist, I was a journalist. I worked on newspapers and magazines where facts were facts and you had to get them right or suffer the humiliation of a printed correction in the newspaper.

As a result, as Christina and I took in this play from our front row seats at the Aurora Theater in Berkeley last night, I had little sympathy for the licentious lyricism of the D’Agata character. I’m down with the fact-checking, reality-confirming Jim Fingal.

Facts matter to me. But so does the “deeper truth” that the D’Agata character so eloquently defends in this play. So, for me, the beauty of nonfiction — the creative kind — is that it must cleave to factual truth at the same time it feels its way toward those deeper truths.

Facts are boney and unforgiving. But put some well chosen words around those bones and you’ve got something lumpy but beautiful.

If you can’t get tickets for the words being thrown around at the Aurora Theater this weekend, don’t forget, there will be crosswords aplenty  at the tournament over on University Avenue.

More about the literary life at, “John Donne, Meet Leonard Cohen — And Send Us a Song From the Mystery Beyond.” Also at, “Writing Retreat Report: I Got Some Work Done. Thanks for Holding Me Accountable.”  And at, “The Rhetorician in the White House — Or, How I Learned to Love the Passive Voice.”