Picture Books and the Lying Liars That Populate Them

You’ll hear a lot of talk about non-fiction for kids in terms of older chapter books.  Picture books don’t spur as much debate, but a post on excelsior file had me pondering authorial intent.  Recently David Elzey brought up an interesting question in terms of the book Keep Your Eye on the Kid: The Early Years of Buster Keaton by Catherine Brighton.  In discussing the author’s choice in including Keaton’s exaggerations in the book itself, he says, "Brighton explains that Keaton was a known storyteller, prone to exaggerating or making up facts about his life . . . Does it help balance out the story arc in a technical sense? Most definitely. Does it belong in a non-fiction picture book where a young reader is getting their introduction about an historical figure? I’m not so sure."

It’s a question that faces all authors of non-fiction picture books.  If your subject is prone to lies and tall tales, should you just cut that interesting stuff out of your narrative altogether?  Take, for example, Meghan McCarthy’s Strong Man: The Life of Charles Atlas.  Here’s a guy, Charles Atlas, who wanted to obliterate his past entirely and remake himself.  So do you just fill your book with blank pages and say [enter real story here] or do you say what your subject said and then explain at the end that they were a bit of a liar and that no one really knows the truth about their past?  If picture book non-fiction ignored the stories of their subjects and didn’t reproduce them, it would certainly be a duller world.  What constitutes "non-fiction" anyway?  Isn’t the author in the clear when they tell their audience about the unreliability of their subject?

The argument is that a small child can’t distinguish between what a story says, and what the author says afterwards.  Would a six-year-old believe the interesting lies and ignore the truth?  Maybe.  It’s always up to the grown-up reading the book to inform or not inform their child about the backmatter.  To my mind, you’re in the clear as long as you say what is and isn’t true at some point.  Of course, I say this and then turn around and get my knickers in a twist over The Yellow Star by Carman Agry Deedy which was a complete fabrication with backmatter that admits quite clearly that none of it was true.  I always thought that it was problematic that the actual heroic actions by real Danes are ignored in the face of a story about what they could have done.  So maybe I’m splitting hairs.  Still, it’s an interesting question.  When your hero is a slick con man, do you hide his cons from the kiddies?

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