Wait! That's not what I meant!

This morning, I was surprised to learn that there is a woman in Spain who claims she is the legal owner of the sun, and that she is going to tax everyone who uses the sun in any way. (Yeah, good luck with that.) What’s interesting is that I came across a related news story in which former Vice President Al Gore sued this woman for global warming. When he was confronted by members of the media who remembered how Gore said in the past that the sun doesn’t cause global warming, people do, Gore apparently recanted and said, oh, it’s the sun after all.

This reminded me of a recent story I came across, in which author Amy Chua, who wrote Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, met so much controversy and outrage over some of the things she wrote about in her book. Her book claims Chinese parents are superior because they don’t allow their kids to have sleepovers or play video games (among other Western sins). After she met an angry throng of readers who don’t agree with her, she pulled the old switcheroo and said something like, “Oh, I was only poking fun at myself.”

OK, got it.

I know we can’t believe everything we read, but it seems wrong that an author would not defend what they have written. They went to all of that trouble, they put in all of that effort, and they're not going to stand by what they wrote? It's a shame, really.

Of course, we cannot say something is indeed “the whole truth and nothing but the truth” because we are not privy to what other people are thinking or feeling (or what their intentions are when they are doing something), but it should still be as accurate as we authors can portray it to be. And we should stand by what we wrote, too – no matter what kind of reaction our books would cause.