Daily Archives: November 27, 2017

At one point, a friend of mine commented that with the way things were going, I should be marketing Trump Card as non-fiction. I conceded that perhaps what was really needed was some version of the opening to the film The Men Who Stare At Goats – “More of this is true than you would believe.” But as this article from Slate points out, because of an oddity in how books are classified, a parody Donald Trump memoir by Alec Baldwin and Kurt Andersen is listed under non-fiction. Even though it’s a parody, and obviously not a real memoir by Donald Trump.

This is not to say that Times readers are likely to be confused by the memoir (though who really knows anymore). The book doesn’t conceal the fact that it is a parody, but there are fictional moments within it that could almost be true, knowing Trump. The book is even written to read like him, with ridiculous lines like “Mitt looks like he could be a winner, but he just doesn’t smell like one” actually being painfully plausible.

Andersen, who sees his book as a work of fiction, said he finds the whole situation “hilariously and delightfully meta.” (Anderson’s radio show, Studio 360, is part of the Slate podcast fold.) When asked why the book was on the Nonfiction list, staff members at the Times said that the book fell under parody or humor (though Jason Zinoman, who reviewed it for Slate, might disagree) and that humor falls under nonfiction. Other parodies to have been categorized as nonfiction include The Onion Book Of Known Knowledge, Earth (The Book), America Again, and I Am America (And So Can You!), though “determinations are made on a case by case basis.”

This is relevant for Trump Card because when I was self-publishing it I had to pick a single category, and settled on Humor/Topical/Political. Even though the book is also a parody of the Young Adult Dystopia genre, the book constructed around a satirical look at Donald Trump and his administration. So it’s humor. Does that make it non-fiction? Some of the material in the book about “David Godfrey” and his “Golden Dawn” group supporting Trump turned out to be weirdly accurate if you substitute some names in there from the real occult community. But otherwise? Of course it’s fiction, regardless of how the classifications fall.