A Bajillion Little Pieces
He showed up at work one day. He was clean-shaven, with a tight blonde bowl cut and the faintest curls of rosacea in his cheeks. His bright blue eyes were wide and seemed to focus on a point just beyond your left shoulder. His enthusiasm was infectious; he was just a temp, but he dove into menial office tasks with the kind of eager glee usually reserved for cartoon Mounties. He was friendly, too. He’d share his lunch, which was inevitably whatever occupied the eye-level rack of the vending machine, and he’d tell us about his life. About classes, which were boring. About his girlfriend, who was beautiful. He would marry her after graduation, he swore. About his father.
He was going to work for his father after he graduated. This job was just for some spending cash. The two of them were going to do cybersecurity for the government. His father had been one of the first hackers ever. He had originally worked for the Russian mob, but had double-crossed them and digitally stolen billions of rubles, fleeing into the night one step ahead of the bratva’s legbreakers. That was how the young man had met his girlfriend. An icy Russian beauty, the daughter of the pakhan, Svetlana had come with them to America after her father vowed to kill her. Her beau knew that he could never marry her until they were safe, so he was training with a samurai sword a blind master had given him on a trip to Japan. The master had told him that the sword had chosen him, and that he was destined to be one of the greatest blademasters in history. He had already defeated Japan’s greatest masters of kendo in an underground tournament. He wished he could compete here, in America, but due to his immense skill he was banned for life from all organized kendo tournaments. It wouldn’t be fair.
Fabulists exist in all walks of life. They’re not quite the same as liars, or even serial liars, or compulsive liars. Honesty is a complicated topic these days. Since the rise of social media, we are constantly presenting ourselves, inventing ourselves, curating ourselves, making sure that the self that others see truly reflects who we are.
Googling “Fabulist” gives you a variety of definitions centered around “storytelling,” but usually in the context of an author or other creative type. I’m not referring to them. I’m referring to the young man above, a man who presented an entire fictional lifestory as though it were true. Broadly, then, a fabulist for the purposes of this piece is “one who tells an extravagant, easily-disproven or simply unbelievable lie about themself and their circumstances.”
It’s certainly reflective of an underlying instability. Ordinary people lie all the time, but they don’t lie like that. What characterizes the fabulist is how impossible his lies are, how easy it is to prove them false, and how ignorant they appear to be of this. A fabulist will lie breezily to your face, and when challenged, will back that up with another lie, equally grand; they are fluid liars, moving from falsehood to falsehood with the trained ease of the expert bullshitter, but they don’t seem delusional. At the core, they know they’re lying. They can’t help it. They believe that they’re getting away with it right up until they’re challenged, at which point they parachute into a new lie.
A mark of the fabulist is the way the lies compound. You can’t meet Svetlana, she’s off training to be a model. Well, she doesn’t have headshots yet, her father might see them and know where she is. She doesn’t text me, her phone doesn’t work on American carriers. She doesn’t want a new phone because this one is all she has to remember her dead sister by. Each lie nestles around the previous one, protecting it from the ravages of reality, but this is an endless process. The fabulist must constantly molt when his story becomes too thin and reinvent himself. Never does he consider that perhaps his past deceptions have made hum untrustworthy; each new pronouncement comes with the complete confidence of one who expect to be believed.
Fabulism comes from the same place as narcissism: a deep and abiding lack of self-regard, a desperate desire to put forward some likable front. Fabulists want you to be in awe of them. They want you to hang on to their every word. They want to be loved, and they’re so convinced that they cannot be that they will create a love-worthy persona out of spare parts. Movie plots, half-remembered family stories, daydreams, a fabulist spins the detritus of the imagination into a sort of candyfloss life: it’s sweet and sparkly, but bite down and there’s nothing there.
Because lying is a social phenomenon, fabulists’ lives and upbringing shape the lies they tell. Male fabulists tend to be macho. Their backstories are full of competitions where they defeat all comers, war heroism, narrow escapes from violent death, superlative athletic skill, beautiful sexual conquests… they’re James Bond at the Olympic Games, quipping brilliantly while they earn yet another gold medal. A single javelin throw shatters the world record and impales a Chinese spy that was taking aim at the President.
Female fabulists, on the other hand, tend to define themselves by their relationships to the famous and powerful. They often include children, borne under unlikely circumstances and lost to terrible tragedies. I had Prince William’s son, but he was washed overboard while I was boating with the Sheikhs. The icy Barack Obama had to send me away — I was too much of a distraction, he said, weeping all the while. The relationships are not always romantic, but they tend to define themselves socially in some way. I taught Venus and Serena how to play. I was the inspiration for La La Land. They place the fabulist at the center of a glorious, glittering universe, where the beautiful people orbit her axis.
The term fabulist is used more often to the literary variety, of whom the modern ur-example is James Frey. A Million Little Pieces, his tearjerking memoir of addiction and redemption, was first boosted into prominence by Oprah. When the lies started to topple she publicly savaged him, salvaging her reputation but ensuring his downfall. Frey made it all up. Why? Perhaps for money, but the root cause for any fabulist is something simpler and sadder. For a moment, Frey was the center of the world. Everyone loved him, pitied him, paid attention to him, wanted to hang on to his every word and retell his sad, sad story to their friends. This must have been the highest high imaginable, and like any great high the crash afterward was devastating.
If you missed the Million Little Pieces saga, good news: you’re about to see it play out in real time again. Kevin Deutsch’s Pill City, perhaps best described as “Freakonomics meets The Wire,” is starting to collapse under its own weight. Credit to David Simon for his excellent investigative journalism — but frankly, even under a cursory examination the whole story stinks. As Will Sommer ably puts it,
A drug dealer watching his underlings work compares it to an episode of Undercover Boss. A beloved anti-drug pastor whistles “Amazing Grace” seconds before he’s killed — and his murderer picks up the tune as he leaves the crime scene. At one point, Pill City’s organizers even swill wine and cut a deal with associates of “El Chapo” Guzman’s Sinaloa Cartel.
Seriously, what the hell? Read Sommer’s piece, by the way, it’s excellent.
Fabulists prey on an essential weakness in the social contract: we assume that people will be honest with us, or if they lie, they will lie in a sensible fashion — subtly, altering details or making plausible claims. When confronted with a story as outlandish as Deutsch’s, our instinct is to assume nobody would tell a lie like that. They take advantage of a loophole, a blind spot in our Bullshit Detector. This can never last for long. A lie this size is unsustainable. The foundation is starting to crack even as the fabulist is frantically mortaring more bricks to the top. The fact that they last any time at all is a testament to the strength of the social contract, and our unwillingness to believe that someone would have the balls to lie on that scale.
Pity the fabulist. They are sad individuals, and (mostly) powerless. The powerful don’t feel the need to concoct elaborate fictions. They are already living the lives fabulists dream of. Once in a while, of course, you get an exception: one already rich and powerful, but so thoroughly empty of self-regard, so pathetically desperate for the approval and adulation of others, that he will spin an endless web of lies to tell people whatever he thinks they want to hear. One who will put reality through a filter so that he must never see or hear anything that upsets him, one who will insist on telling his own story even when he must deny the reality in front of his face. But even such a person could never pose a serious threat to anyone but himself… unless he were to be elected President.
