>This is true of basically all literary journalism. How do so many interesting things happen to these people that they can write about it? Easy, they make it up.

It is not all made up.

>“There is just a very shallow truth in facts,” he told me. “Otherwise, the phone directory would be the Book of Books.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/04/24/the-ecstatic-t...