On January 27, 2017, President Donald J. Trump issued an executive order that temporarily banned travel from seven Muslim-majority countries. In defending the order, portions of which were later blocked by the courts, Senior Counsel to the President Kellyanne Conway cited the “Bowling Green Massacre,” an instance of domestic terrorism perpetrated by two Iraqi nationals who entered the United States as refugees. The event was a fabrication. Conway later claimed she misspoke.
Such occurrences are now commonplace in our “post-truth” politics where conspiracy theories carry the same currency as hard facts. A shared sense of reality has been relegated to the station of a snow globe—quaint, outmoded, and impossible to penetrate. How are writers to respond to this state-of-affairs, let alone cope with the viral character and breathless pace of our fractured discourse?
In her debut book of fiction, Alternative Facts (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2025), Emily Greenberg gathers the shards of our shared reality and fashions them into seven sharp, genre-defying stories. Mingling recent historical facts with vivid characters and captivating scenes of her own invention, Greenberg unleashes narratives that encapsulate and complicate the joys and sorrows of life in the age of Barbies and bombs, phony massacres, and escalating political violence.
In writing Alternative Facts, Greenberg turns the tables on the liars and conspiracy theorists, making them into fictional subjects ripe for speculation and literary analysis. Through satire, absurdity, and her own brand of character-driven storytelling, Greenberg reclaims the tools of narrative fiction in service of curiosity, self-reflection, and empathy. While others employ fiction to divide us, Emily Greenberg charts a path toward reclaiming our commonalities.
I met her in 2017 while we were both MFA candidates at The Ohio State University, and I had the good fortune to read early drafts of several stories in Alternative Facts. When she called me in the fall of 2023 to ask if I was interested in editing one of the stories before it was scheduled to go to press, I jumped at the chance. Greenberg’s fiction is the work of a sharp, curious, and inventive mind. Her writing and friendship are gifts that I deeply treasure, and I am overjoyed that more readers will now have the opportunity to engage with her characters and ideas.
I was delighted to talk with her over Zoom about her writing process, the relationship between form and content, and how the tools of fiction can be wielded as a potent form of truth-telling. The conversation has been edited for clarity and conciseness.
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The Rumpus: The collection’s titular story, “Alternative Facts,” is told from the perspective of a fictionalized version of Kellyanne Conway. Where did the idea for the story come from?
Emily Greenberg: “Alternative Facts” was actually the last piece I wrote for the collection. I’ve always been interested in the porous boundaries between truth and fiction, reality and simulation, public persona and private selves. I was in fourth grade when the Twin Towers were struck, and so I came of age post-9/11, when our country went to war in Iraq under false pretenses and Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness.” Social media was also just starting up when I was in high school, and we of course now know how social media has fractured our sense of shared reality, blurred the lines between public and private, and enabled the rise of Donald Trump.
Kellyanne Conway, who infamously used the term “alternative facts” to defend White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s false statements about the crowd size at Trump’s first inauguration, is really the perfect figure to think through these themes. She wields fictions to manipulate us. Throughout the book, I’m trying to use fiction for another purpose: as a way of connecting, understanding, and making meaning across splintered realities. Unlike conspiracy theorists or disinformation sowers, I’m more interested in using fiction as a speculative tool so we can remain curious about one another and ask, “What if?”
At some point, I read an article claiming Kellyanne had punched someone at the Inaugural Ball, but I couldn’t find much else about it—few sources, no pictures. Gaps in the historical record like that are incredibly enticing to me as a fiction writer. I wanted to imagine the circumstances leading up to this alleged incident.
Rumpus: Why did you construct “Alternative Facts” as a single run-on sentence?
Greenberg: While researching for this story, I watched hours of Kellyanne Conway interviews. She talks so, so, so, so fast, and she’s always pivoting, turning the question back around to avoid answering it. She’s constantly shifting back and forth and contradicting herself, but she speaks so quickly that, as a listener, you just go along with it and only later realize what she’s obscuring. Does she even stop to breathe? I wanted to challenge myself to write a really long run-on sentence with this back-and-forth quality where the reader also can’t stop to breathe.
Rumpus: In addition to Conway, your collection features fictional versions of Donald Trump, Paris Hilton, B. F. Skinner, and other prominent figures. Did your view of them change as your research and your writing developed? And if so, how?
Greenberg: Yes, very much! I often write about people with whom I strongly disagree, but for fiction to work, for a reader to invest, the characters need depth and complexity. I try to approach my subjects with a sense of curiosity and openness. With Kellyanne in particular, I wanted to know how she became this way.
When you ask little kids what they want to do when they grow up, most would not say they dream of telling lies and providing cover for a presidential administration enacting unpopular, harmful policies! And so, I started looking into Kellyanne’s background. She had a difficult childhood and overcame hardship, which I found admirable. She became a huge success in a male-dominated profession despite encountering significant sexism and misogyny. I was able to empathize with those parts of her biography and to see her as a complicated human being rather than simply a monster. At the same time, despite her own history, she also defended Donald Trump after the Access Hollywood tape came out and worked to repair his reputation. Learning more about her doesn’t make me like her as a person. It doesn’t make me want to justify the terrible things she’s done, but it makes her more complicated and even tragic. It makes for good fiction.
Rumpus: Reality has a way of turning prominent people into symbols, but your fiction takes these symbols and turns them back into people. Fictional people, of course, but in the world of your stories, they become relatable, even empathetic. What do you hope your reader is going to take away?
Greenberg: I get asked the question about empathy a lot, and my thoughts on empathy are complicated. On the one hand, we’re experiencing huge empathy gaps right now in our culture, turning a blind eye to suffering, demonizing whole groups of people instead of seeing them as human beings. But empathy isn’t enough—we need to take actions and improve the material conditions of people who are suffering. Empathy can also be dangerous when it’s not combined with self-awareness. You can’t really walk a mile in somebody else’s shoes, and it’s important to recognize those limits.
Some people say that reading literature makes you a more empathetic person, a better person, but I don’t agree. Plenty of well-read people have done terrible things. This doesn’t mean that reading isn’t meaningful or that it doesn’t inform the way we view and relate to others, but it’s not such a simple causal relationship. Teju Cole, a writer I deeply admire, has written a great piece about this in relation to Obama’s drone policies, which I highly recommend.
Because I’ve chosen to write about many public figures whose views and actions I strongly disagree with, the book is openly thinking through questions of empathy. I’m challenging myself and my readers to empathize with these characters and to try to understand how they came to their beliefs and why they act the ways they do without excusing their actions. I think it’s easier to write off these people as monsters rather than recognize their complexity and see aspects of ourselves reflected in them. It’s a way of letting ourselves off the hook.
Rumpus: Your story “From the Eyes of Travelers” takes as its subject the 2016 assassination of Andrei Karlov, the Russian ambassador to Türkiye [Turkey]. It is also the only story in the collection written in the first person. What motivated the choice to write from this point of view?
Greenberg: “From the Eyes of Travelers” refers to a photo exhibition in the story and in real life that featured photographs of Russia taken by Turkish photographers. In the story, I’m also a traveler trying to see my character Burhan Özbilici, who is inspired by the real person who photographed Karlov’s assassination at a gallery in Ankara. I read the real photographer’s first-person account of the event, and I wanted to grapple with some of the questions it raised for me. I’m trying to inhabit his perspective.
Rumpus: Did you succeed?
Greenberg: Actually, no. I don’t feel like the process of writing the story brought me any closer to understanding the real photographer’s perspective—I turned him into a fictional character, after all—but this is one of the points I’m trying to make in Alternative Facts. In the photo exhibition, the photographers’ Turkish perspective inevitably informs how they photograph Russia. We’re always imposing our own subjectivity. Perfect empathy is unattainable. There’s no way to truly see from the eyes of another, and the story is openly wrestling with that.
Rumpus: One of the most exciting aspects of reading Alternative Facts is the way it shifted my frame of reference. For a reader, that can be the starting point to developing a more fulsome worldview that includes room for nuance and disagreement. Has writing and reading fiction helped to refine your viewpoints in this way?
Greenberg: That’s really great to hear. I do hope the book will encourage people to remain curious about one another and open to having these more nuanced conversations about difficult topics. I feel like it’s becoming harder and harder to find people willing to have those conversations, and it’s had such a detrimental effect on our public discourse.
Rumpus: In writing about these prominent figures, many of whom are very powerful in our society and our politics, were you ever concerned about angering the wrong people or getting any kind of blowback?
Greenberg: I don’t think fiction writers should shy away from critiquing or satirizing public figures or using the tools of fiction to illuminate and complicate the world we live in. There’s also a long, rich history of novelists writing about public figures. Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde, Lance Olsen’s Nietzsche’s Kisses, Mark Doten’s The Infernal, Joanna Scott’s Arrogance, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours.
Rumpus: But many of your characters are based not on figures from history but on living people who are still very active and influential.
Greenberg: This is definitely less common, but it’s still done. Nixon was alive when Coover published A Public Burning. Lydia Millet has written about Madonna and Sharon Stone. Michael Martone has written about Dan Quayle. I very intentionally label my fictions as fictions. I’m not trying to deceive or manipulate people into thinking they’re real or that the people they’re based on actually did or said these things, which is also why there’s a lot of absurdity in my stories. Most include fantastical elements because I don’t want the reader to be confused and assume these things actually happened.
Rumpus: Rather than disguise these figures with pseudonyms or innuendo, you name them. What is the intention there?
Greenberg: The scholar Michael Lackey has written a lot about this sort of work, which he calls “biofiction.” He does a great job differentiating between historical fiction, the documentary novel, and biofiction and also explaining what gave rise to biofiction. It’s a little hard for me to summarize, but he ties biofiction, where real names are used, to certain developments in postmodernism. There’s a shift away from viewing history or biography as objective and a consequent mixing of what were previously regarded as separate entities: fiction and nonfiction. There’s also more focus on individual psychology and a shifting away from ahistorical universalisms. My characters are not allegorical or symbolic. They’re not archetypes. The reader already possesses certain knowledge about these figures that you can work with and against. When you use actual names, you’re dealing with concrete figures and their specific histories and contexts. This allows for a more potent social critique of those contexts, and it’s also more honest. Because I’m building these characters based on real people and using some real details about them, it would feel disingenuous to then disguise that fact.
Rumpus: In “Houston We’ve Had a Problem,” one of your characters suffers a brain injury and can only speak in movie quotes. In another story, “In the Desert of the Real,” you draw an allegory to the film The Truman Show. Can you elaborate on your interest in film and how it connects to your fiction?
Greenberg: I make experimental films and media art, and I have a background in visual art. All the stories in Alternative Facts have some connection to art. There’s painting in “Tonight Show,” photography in “From the Eyes of Travelers,” music in “The Author and the Heiress,” and creative writing in “Black Box.” That wasn’t intentional. I’ve just always been interested in people who make things, which also ties into the book’s larger interests in representation and mediation.
Being an artist helps me think about form and genre. It’s common for contemporary artists to work across different media. The same artist might make sculptures, videos, photographs, and performances. So, the question becomes, why is this particular form the best fit for this content? I try to think similarly with my writing. What form is best for this story? Should it be told as a conventional, character-driven, scene-based story? Or should the story be told in vignettes, in a screenplay format, as a single sentence?
Rumpus: “Lost in the Desert of the Real” is a prime illustration of your attention to form. The reader encounters multiple perspectives, lists, an analysis of The Truman Show, and various images that construct a fictional account of the 2018 Hawai‘i false missile alert. How did you arrive at this particular form?
Greenberg: I wanted to describe the event from multiple perspectives and to move through it by association rather than linearly. It felt right to include reconstructed images to gesture at the idea that what we consume is often mediated, and I also wanted to mingle fictionalized versions of real figures with movie characters. I couldn’t get over the fact that Jim Carrey, who played the lead character in The Truman Show, actually tweeted about the false missile alert! That was too perfect a coincidence for me not to use it in some way.
Rumpus: Your photojournalist in “From the Eyes of Travelers” also thinks through these ideas related to mediation and simulation. Do you see any overlap between the journalistic quest for objectivity and the fiction writer’s quest to illuminate deeper truths about society and the human condition?
Greenberg: Oh, definitely. Fiction writers and journalists are pursuing two different kinds of truth. As a fiction writer, I have so many literary tools at my disposal that journalists are not really allowed to use. For example, I can go inside a character’s head and depict their innermost thoughts and feelings. Journalists can interview people, but isn’t the person being interviewed just performing in a way? While a journalist might need to describe events at a remove, as a fiction writer, I can describe in ways that aren’t strictly accurate and use various figurative devices. I can describe what something feels like on a more bodily, subjective, or metaphorical level. I can get at consciousness. I can open things up and poke around. Journalists also have to write in a very clear way to convey information, but fiction writers can use complex syntaxes and structures that affect pacing, mood, and tone. Even though it’s fiction, there’s a deeper symbolic truth I’m getting at: an authenticity of feeling.
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Author photograph by Jason Wilbur
