True to Life

I dug last week's post by Cynic over at Ta-Nehisi's place, on the importance of teaching non-fiction, quite a bit. He wrote:

We need to teach them how to write about other people, other places, and other times; how to wrestle with the limits of knowledge when the gaps cannot be plugged by imagination; how to convey complicated thoughts in simple words; how to pull a clear narrative line from the tangled skein of life; and above all, how to find their own rhythm and sing the music of language.

I agree with all of this. I also think fiction writers should read non-fiction so they can be reminded that it's far too each to fall into story tropes, and that the randomness of life generates bewitching stories. I've always found memoir fabulists more pathetic than anything else is that their betrayals seem to stem from a conviction that their lives will never be as interesting and compelling as they want them to be. That seems like an enormous and tragic surrender, both of living, and of observing.