In my career as a writer of things (poems, mainly; now also novels) I have experienced my fair share of fact-checkers and copy-editors catching vital things (attributing quotes and paraphrases to their correct sources, ironing out chronological mishaps) and also failing to do so (questioning what year FREAKS was made or assuming a news article I refer to doesn’t exist). As a perfectionist, I enjoy supplementing them with my own sources, or glibly correcting their claims. As a perfectionist, too, I will ride for them any day because I need them for what I desire most: clean beautiful texts that I can’t find under this-is-unedited-and-embarrassing-dot-com.

I know fact-checkers and copyeditors are a necessary part of literary production, for they ensure, especially in the “now more than ever” stupidity slope we have been skating down on for the last ten years, that the sentences we purvey as truths are corroborated with sources. I know this from college, where we wrote essays with pristinely formatted footnotes and bibliographies. I know this applies to big news (did the plane really crash at noon or was it 1 pm?), medium news (did neighbor A shoot neighbor B with a rifle or a handgun?), and small news (did that singer really perm her hair for the first time in five years?). I know the practice is incalculably crucial for debates, slogans, propaganda, and whatever other political context we could come up with. What I have been trying to avoid knowing though is how fact-checking applies to the form I hate writing the most: the personal essay. Now I know.

Really, I want to write about the abysmal affect I will henceforth call “feeling fact-checked.” I thought politicians probably feel this all the time, though they are ventriloquists of texts composed by speechwriters, and rarely concern themselves with the veracity of their claims, especially in our, whatever, I’m tired, post-truth world. Though, if I’m being specific, I know they probably don’t know this feeling unless they’re involved in scandals, because the type of fact-checking I’m referring to is personal; it has little to do with “objective truth” or science-based knowledge regarding our shared reality or historical matters. It’s much more private, much more related to gossip than to facts. I want fact-checkers to see if I got the date right. What I don’t want is for them to call my friend and ask if I really wore a silver bikini at a festival fifteen years ago.