The “60 Minutes” exposé of the beloved-mountaineer-turned-best-selling-author Greg Mortenson’s memoir “Three Cups of Tea” is difficult to watch. The writer declined to speak to the show, and, as the fifteen-minute segment rolls along, with one damning bit of evidence after another—from the statement of the even more beloved-mountaineer-turned-best-selling-author Jon Krakauer that Mortenson’s tale of how he came to build schools for kids across Pakistan and Afganistan “is a beautiful story, and it’s a lie” to the images of those schools filled not with children but blocks of hay—his silence comes to seem an admission. At the end of the show, when reporters confront Mortenson at a book-signing in Atlanta, the fear on his face isn’t as telling as the silent nod he gives to a man standing to his right, who promptly calls security. Is he a writer and a philanthropist or a celebrity trying to prevent the crack in his hitherto flawless exterior from growing any wider?
Television is, of course, as good at creating beautiful lies as memoirs are, and Mortenson’s ineptitude at managing this PR disaster, driven home by the statement he sent to supporters yesterday, in which he vows to fight the allegations but offers no specifics, might, in an earlier era, have been reassuring. But though we might still be willing, as a memoir-consuming public, to put up with teensy white lies for a great “true” story, we are way past the point where we’re willing to put up with major fabrications, and we were never willing to put up with profiteering. There’s a tacit understanding between the author of a book that draws attention to a social injustice while proffering a solution and the buyer of that book: the understanding is that the purchase is akin to a donation. We don’t usually seek to know exactly how the money’s being spent, but we assume it’s serving the cause in some non-frivolous way (“60 Minutes” reveals that donations to the Central Asia Institute, the charity that Mortenson set up to run the schools, have gone toward luxuries like private jets for Mortenson). Savvy authors of these types of books (like Rebecca Skloot), will tell the press exactly what they’re doing with it. Mortenson, if he is innocent, is going to have to do better than impassioned denials.
This scandal is only tangentially about the difficulty of ensuring truthfulness in non-fiction writing, which is a problem we’ll never fully solve (book publishers can’t afford fact-checking, but even fact-checked writing depends a great deal on trust). It’s about the particulars: our country is deeply invested—financially, psychologically, and emotionally—in the region where Mortenson sets his tale, and eager to help create a happy ending. Barack Obama donated a hundred thousand dollars to the Central Asia Institute; “Three Cups of Tea” is required reading for American troops sent to Afghanistan; and the “Young Reader’s Edition” is essentially required reading for American school children. In other words, the book is central to the story we’re writing about ourselves, and if certain aspects of it turn out not to be true (like whether Mortenson was really held captive by the Taliban), we’ll have to find different ways of telling that story. The Times talked to a military official in Afghanistan, who said, “We continue to believe in the logic of what Greg is trying to accomplish in Afghanistan and Pakistan because we know the powerful effects that education can have on eroding the root causes of extremism.” That’s an endorsement of an idea, not a person—the hope is that the idea can survive the person who gave it life, should that person be found wanting.
