Andrea Barrett's "Dust and Light"

On my recent trip to Italy, I took a little book with me – Andrea Barrett’s Dust and Light (2025). It’s a collection of seven essays on the art of fact in fiction. I enjoyed it immensely, even though my interest is in the art of fact, not fiction. In the essay “The Years and The Years,” Barrett praises Virginia Woolf’s ability to balance fact and imagination. She writes, 

Fact dissolved fully into fiction: what Woolf learned is to so deeply integrated into her imagination that it emerges in her characters with the same offhand immediacy as lived experience.

Fact dissolved fully into fiction – I found myself turning this phrase over and over in my mind as I cycled the Via Claudia Augusta. When facts are dissolved in fiction, they lose their factuality. They become fiction. For Barrett, this is a good thing, this is what art (her art, at least) is all about – the transformation of fact into fiction. But for me, the dissolution of facts in fiction seems like a waste. I much prefer their preservation as facts, in first-person chronicles of real experience, e.g., John McPhee’s Coming into the Country, Ian Frazier’s Great Plains, Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before, Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands, Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau. These books are as artful and meaningful as any novel, and yet their narratives are real, not fabricated. When it comes to representation of reality, I’ll take fact over fiction any day.