II. Fallacies of Fact and Fiction

The opposition between fiction and non-fiction is one we take for granted, but, like all such assumptions, it needs a stern interrogative look. In theory, fiction consists of invented stories: non-fiction of real ones. The purpose of non-fiction is to describe what is true and real; fiction, on the other hand, is designed to entertain, to stimulate the imagination. The New Zealand writer, Carmel Bird, talks of our cultural discomfort at not being able to put writing in boxes: ‘A box of fact and a box of fiction. We grow bewildered and even angry when we suspect writers are chucking bits from one box into another’ (Bird, 1992: 10). The binary world of fact versus fiction is accompanied by others: the public and the private; science and art; objective and subjective; reason and emotion; men and women; culture and nature; sex and gender. Such dualities are far from being abstractions free from ideological content; they are inherently sexist and key to the social system of patriarchy (Lange, 1990). My own career as a writer of both fact and fiction began with the discovery that much academic writing was (is) a concealed form of fiction (fiction masquerading as superior fact), particularly about women and other marginalized social groups. The American academic and fiction writer Carolyn Heilbrun has distin-