Excellent points. And of course, when Ayers wrote “Dreams”, he made the literary caveat that “hey, this isn’t really factual, many of the people are “composites” [THERE YOU GO!@!!] and some don’t even exist. Oh, and the timing may be totally off, and we’ve made up dialogue”.
Why does a living soul believe ANYTHING in that steaming pile of propaganda?
He lies, she lies, they lie, they all lie, and I’m going to feed the ducks!
‘Dreams From My Father’s’ literary license
Comments (19) By BYRON TAU | 5/2/12 11:14 AM EDT David Maraniss, writing in Vanity Fair, reports that President Obama seems to have taken some degree of literary license in his memoir “Dreams From My Father” — with one character in particular, Obama’s mysterious New York girlfriend.
In one chapter, Obama describes a fight with a woman he describes only as his ‘New York girlfriend’ after seeing a play by a black playwright, after which Obama’s girlfriend asked why “black people were so angry all the time?”
Maraniss, who located the woman that Obama had a long relationship with in New York City, reports that the incident did not happen — and that Obama took a degree of literary license in stitching events and characters together to make his thematic points work better:
When asked about this decades later, during a White House interview, Obama acknowledged that the scene did not happen with Genevieve. “It is an incident that happened,” he said. But not with her. He would not be more specific, but the likelihood is that it happened later, when he lived in Chicago. “That was not her,” he said. “That was an example of compression I was very sensitive in my book not to write about my girlfriends, partly out of respect for them.”
It would be hard to accuse Obama of painting an idealized portrait of himself in “Dreams” — he does, after all, admit to things (like drug use) and tackle subjects (like race and identity) that most budding politicians would gladly steer clear of when writing a memoir. But it underscores how, in writing “Dreams,” Obama had literary ambitions that seem to have sometimes exceeded the literal truth.
It’s an interpretation that Maraniss largely backs, telling Vanity Fair “I say that his memoir is a remarkably insightful exploration of his internal struggle but should not be read as rigorous factual history.”
UPDATE, via Dylan Byers: Obama disclosed that some of his characters were composites. In the introduction to “Dreams from My Father,” he writes that “some of the characters that appear are composites of people I’ve known.”