Hannah Gold at Bookforum:
In a 1996 interview with The Paris Review, the reporter and novelist John Gregory Dunne was asked why he chose to classify his 1974 book, Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, as fiction as opposed to journalism. The book recounts six months Dunne spent alone in Vegas, taking a break from his marriage. Dunne, the narrator and protagonist of the book, spends most of it in a severe depression contemplating the possibility of divorce, eating junk food in his rental, and hanging out with a bunch of Vegas archetypes: the sex worker, the private investigator, the failed comic. Dunne tells the interviewer that although he was contracted at the time to write a nonfiction book, he opted to call the finished product a novel “since I made most of it up.” He offers as an example a scene in which he meets the sex worker, Artha, at a casino at five in the morning. He’s not there to gamble money; his brand of gambling takes the form of talking to strangers while in the grip of insomnia. During his conversation with Artha, he discovers some obviously bad poetry she has written on the back of a keno ticket, which he reproduces for the reader. It’s true, Dunne tells the interviewer, that while in Vegas he met a sex worker who wrote poetry. But the poems that appear in the book were written as a joke by his wife, Joan Didion.
more here.
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