Book Review: Alternative Facts by Emily Greenberg

Reviewed by Erica Ball

A funny, incisive dive into the minds of some much-maligned public figures

Did you know Kellyanne Conway punched a man three times in the face at Trump’s inaugural ball? Well, according to reporting at the time, she did. Why’d she do that? What was going through her mind? That’s the subject of the first and title story in Alternative Facts by Emily Greenberg.

“Why’d they do that?” and “What were they thinking?” are just a couple of the fundamental questions at the heart of this series of satirical stories delving into the minds and motivations of celebrities and historical figures. Some of the more unexpected questions include: How do George W. Bush’s paintings relate to his time as president? What would lead psychologist B. F. Skinner to believe in the lack of free will? What would happen if a film professor suddenly could only speak in movie quotes? What if Paris Hilton and Thomas Pynchon had more in common than we thought? What was going on with the governor of Hawaii during the false Hawaiian missile alert?

Each of these questions is explored in a style most suitable for its subject. The Conway story is one extremely long, mind-bending run-on sentence that denies multiple realities. The Skinner story is told like observations of a test subject. The film professor’s story is written like a film script. Many of the stories also feature visual aids. Though rich in historical and cultural allusions, some portions are purely fictional.

These are stories that will stay with you. Maybe because of how absurd, yet somehow believable they are. Maybe because of their unconventional formats, or because of the intensity of diving so deeply and so compassionately into the intimate and personal inner worlds of these flawed and complex characters. The author’s insight on the effect of trauma and formative memories is remarkable, as is the tight and succinct prose it uses to achieve it.

This book has broad appeal because of Greenberg’s ever-apparent abilities on the sentence level as with the book’s emotionally charged social commentary. I’d highly recommend Alternative Facts for psychology and satire fans, especially those who follow American politics and celebrity culture. 

With its empathetic examinations of these public figures and its attempt to explain (but not excuse) these superficially known public figures, it will be of particular interest to readers who are fascinated by flawed characters and anti-heroes. 

These stories remind us that all human behavior, even the most confusing kind, comes from somewhere. Absolutely everyone, even those we tend to dismiss, have concrete reasons for acting like they do. Every person has an inner life of impulses, secrets, and stories resulting from their lifetime of unique experiences. Even more importantly, stories like these remind us that some of the people we disagree with the most function as mirrors to the things we don’t want to acknowledge about ourselves and our society.

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