David Foster Wallace on nonfiction
The late novelist and journalist was interviewed by Becky Bradway for Creating Nonfiction: A Guide and Anthology by Bradway and Doug Hesse: “The reader’s pre-suspension of disbelief gives nonfiction a particular kind of power, but it also seems to encumber the nonfiction with a kind of moral obligation fiction doesn’t have. If a piece of fiction is markedly implausible or ‘untrue’ in some way, the reader feels a certain bored distaste, or maybe disappointment. If a piece of nonfiction, though, …