Emily Greenberg's 'Alternative Facts': A post-truth blend of fiction, politics and pop culture

"A lie is a kind of fiction," says San Diego writer Emily Greenberg.

"These are post-truth characters. They've lied to us. They've spread misinformation. They've told us fictions in a way."

Greenberg's debut book of short stories, "Alternative Facts," captures this unraveling of truth in American politics, often using real public characters or events spun into absurdist fiction. Her writing expertly, insightfully and delightfully picks at the scab of the modern world.

One story in the collection is a single, extended sentence inside the head of Kellyanne Conway, former Trump adviser. Another takes us back to George W. Bush's childhood. One imagines an unlikely encounter between reality TV star and heiress Paris Hilton and Thomas Pynchon, the reclusive postmodern novelist.

Greenberg, who recently completed an MFA in visual art at UC San Diego, will celebrate the book’s launch at 1 p.m. on Sunday, March 23, at Warwick's Books in La Jolla as part of the "Weekends with Locals" series.

Interview highlights

On getting inside Kellyanne Conway's head

Most of the stories in the book are about characters who are related to post-truth in some way. Kellyanne obviously relates to that pretty directly because she coined this term 'alternative facts' — she was defending a lie that the press secretary Sean Spicer made about the size of the crowd at Trump's inauguration.

For each of the stories, I wanted to craft a distinct point of view. For Kellyanne, when I was researching her, I watched a bunch of footage of her speaking, and she, of course, speaks so, so, so fast. There's almost no pause for you as a listener to catch up.

She also pivots very quickly, so she'll say things that are not really logical. If you were to actually break them down, she's not answering the questions — she's sort of dodging away from them. But because she's speaking so quickly, it's really hard to pick it out while it's happening.

So I wanted to write in this really long, run-on stream-of-consciousness sentence to sort of capture the way that she speaks. And also one of the things I was trying to do with it was to capture that pivoting nature. In the story, basically, she contradicts herself a number of times and sort of pivots back and forth. That's sort of reflected in the syntax of the story as well.

When I was writing that story, I really immersed myself in video and text about her. I was reading about her constantly. I was watching hours and hours of footage of her talking. I even read a book (Jarret Berenstein's "The Kellyanne Conway Technique") about her conversational technique.

I really wanted to immerse myself in her to the point where I could hear the sort of fictional version of her voice talking to me in my head, which is kind of scary. So yeah, it's tough.

On politics, pop culture and the moment

I'm kind of a politics junkie, so I am paying attention to that a lot. And one of the things I was hoping to do with this was to write something that could speak directly to our moment.

And the book has a lot of pop cultural references. It also has a lot of literary references. So it's kind of this mix of high and low, which I think I gravitate to as a reader. I hope when people are reading the book that there are parts of it they can gravitate to as well — it speaks on such different cultural registers that I'm hoping there's a little something there for everyone.

On humor, satire and absurdity

I really love humorous writing. I'm a big fan of George Saunders, so I'm always trying to incorporate humor into my work. It's a significant human emotion. It's working sort of satirically, and I'm poking at some of these larger-than-life, very powerful figures using that humor. 

On blurring the line between fact and fiction

There are a lot of tools available to the fiction writer that are not available to a journalist. As a fiction writer, I'm allowed to take certain poetic liberties. Instead of having to describe things exactly as they are, I can use more inventive sentence structures. I can use metaphor. I can use figurative language and literary devices.

These are post-truth characters. They've lied to us. They've spread misinformation. So they've told us fictions in a way. A lie is a kind of fiction. So, this is sort of my attempt to turn the tables a bit. I want to use fiction against them. But instead of using fiction as a lie, using fiction to manipulate and divide us. I'm hoping to use fiction to build understanding and to help us understand each other more deeply as people.

And I can also go inside of a character's head and talk about what they're thinking, what they're feeling. That's pretty different from how a journalist would approach a similar subject matter. You're not really supposed to go inside somebody's head like that.

I see all of these current events and all of these historical events, and there are just gaps and there are things I'm curious about. So I want to use fiction to kind of open them up and sort of go into the event. I want to create these more sort of sensorial experiences of an event instead of being relegated to just sort of saying what happened.

Being able to use fiction to go into these events, while still having them tethered to the real event and those real contexts and those real references — it operates pretty differently from journalism on the one hand, but also pretty differently than if I were to simply invent everything. These are anchored to something real and the reader is sort of bringing their own understanding of those events and their own understanding of these people as they're reading the story. The fiction, it just is a way to open it up.

On that 2018 Hawaiian missile false alarm

The story "Lost in the Desert of the Real," it's about the Hawaiian false missile alert. Basically, this alert went out as if there were a missile headed to Hawaii and it turned out not to be true. But everyone reacted as if it were true, because they had no other information at the time that it wasn't real. They then proceeded to have these very real, horrifying experiences, you know, thinking that these might be their last moments on Earth. And those experiences were real. So in a story like this, I've written it in a very experimental way. It goes from some of the more public figures — Trump, the Hawaiian governor — into more ordinary people and what they were experiencing on the day.

My goal was to try to recreate the feeling of this event — not literally what had happened, but what it felt like. So being able to dip into all these different people's heads and write from all these different perspectives. There were, of course, a lot of eyewitness accounts and a lot of journalistic articles at the time. But as a fiction writer, being able to kind of freely move between all of these, it just creates a very different experience of the event. I'm definitely driven to experimental forms if I think it'll serve the story.

On absurdity, Pynchon and … Paris Hilton?

I've always been drawn to absurd humor in fiction, and I think there's a lot of that in my fiction. Some of the absurdity is coming from real things — it's not invented. But some of the absurdity, I'm kind of building off the real absurdity and just pushing it a little bit more.

The idea for "The Author and the Heiress," actually came from something I read by San Diego Union-Tribune book critic Arthur Salm. He was writing about Thomas Pynchon's work, and he said something along the lines of, he's such a misanthrope, if Thomas Pynchon and Paris Hilton were ever to meet the universe would just explode.

As a fiction writer, that was so enticing. It was almost like a dare — the quote, it said something like, "It's beyond imagining." That's like a dare. You just want to try. 

In this story, it alternates between the perspectives of Paris Hilton and Thomas Pynchon. I tried to write the Thomas Pynchon perspective sort of as an homage to his work — written in the style of his work. And then for the Paris Hilton point of view, I wanted it to sound like her manner of speaking. She speaks in this sort of valley girl voice, and she has all these famous catch phrases, so I wanted to try writing it like that.

It was just a lot of fun to pair these two together, and they go on this kind of wild adventure that is just totally absurd. I think they start off sort of thinking they're kind of opposites, but they actually realize they have quite a bit in common.

On ethics — and calling out people in power

Some people have cautioned me away from doing this, but I think it's important to be able to critique public figures. And I think it's also very different to be writing fiction about public figures versus private individuals — to me, the latter feels much less ethical.

I think we have a duty to critique public figures, and in the case of my book, I've written about Donald Trump, I've written about Kellyanne Conway, George W. Bush, people like that. 

When it comes to private figures, I would be much more cautious about that. For "Lost in the Desert of the Real" (the Hawaii missile false alert story), I did work from some eyewitness accounts — so those were private individuals. I didn't want any of the private individuals to be recognizable, so I used a memoir technique of blending them together. Also, blending them with more fantastical elements, so they're not identifiable — and it's also clear that it's fiction because it's blended with these more fantastical elements.

On short stories

As a writer, the short story form allows me to experiment more. You can try a lot of things out really quickly. I was also able to adopt more experimental forms than I would have in a longer work — for example, writing a whole piece that's one sentence. That's a lot to get through just in a short story form, but it would be pretty insufferable if the whole book was like that. I have a number of other experimental forms like that.

One of the stories is written in this sort of box-like structure. Another one of the stories is formatted like a screenplay. So I get to have these extreme forms and to really find the perfect form for each story. Whereas over the course of a longer work like a novel, those might get tiresome or just kind of limiting — you might want a little more flexibility. And as a reader, I really love the short form. I think it's under-celebrated, under-recognized.

There's just something in the short form, the need for concision. You're not allowed to waste any room. So it's kind of like telling a good joke.