It’s bad enough that it’s called nonfiction, named for what it isn’t rather than what it is, as if we decided to call poetry nonprose, or day nonnight.

It’s bad enough that some practitioners of this genre that has no proper name of its own have undermined its credibility, chipping away at its special power of authenticity by fabrication and invention, or dulling its fine edge by substituting memory for research and reporting.  Now there’s something else to be concerned about:  It may be that fans of this beleaguered genre don’t actually want nonfiction at all.  They want fantasy.

Here’s my recent ah-ha moment on that subject:  I had just bought and started reading a wonderful book called Tales of a Female Nomad.  It’s the story of a woman who took to traveling the world by herself after her marriage fell apart.  The book came out in 2001 and made barely a ripple in the publishing pond.

This is a thoughtful book about an ordinary woman who didn’t just face and come to terms with her loneliness and vulnerability – that’s embedded in the book but is not the point.  It is a book about embracing and learning from cultures, about trusting strangers, about learning to be at home in the world.  As I read this largely forgotten book, I couldn’t stop thinking about another seemingly similar woman’s travel narrative, the current publishing sensation, Eat, Pray, Love, which is #1 on the New York Times paperback nonfiction best-seller list and has been for quite a while.  It’s a BookSense bestseller, an Oprah rave, and a book group fave. 

Both of these books are adventure travel memoirs written by smart women who want to learn something from their experiences.  Yet the gulf between them is unswimmable:  One is nonfiction; the other is fantasy.

In Nomad, a middle-aged woman – from her author photo, she looks to be both plain and plump – weathers the end of an almost three-decades-long marriage, says goodbye to her two grown (and very worried) children, puts herself on a $15,000 a year budget and travels the globe for more than a decade, funding her peripatetic life by writing the occasional children’s book.

In Eat, Pray, Love, a very pretty thirty-something woman with a thriving writing career recovers from the kind of bad marriage one can have in one’s twenties (no kids, baggage light enough to be of the carry-on variety) by indulging her senses with stays in Italy, India and Indonesia.  The author of Eat, Pray, Love sets out on her several-month adventure funded by a six-figure book advance.

The gulf between the two books only widens from there. 

In the first scene of Female Nomad, our heroine is sitting in her economy hotel room in Cuernavaca, exhausted and hungry.  She wants dinner, but she is too intimidated to go to a restaurant by herself.  She imagines sitting alone at a table.  People will look at her.  She’ll feel awkward and uncomfortable.  She calls down for room service and learns there is none.  So she takes a cab to a better-class hotel and hangs out in the lobby waiting to see if she can make a connection with a friendly person who she can enlist as a dinner mate.

Eat, Pray, Love, on the other hand, opens with our self-assured heroine wondering if she should have an affair with the gorgeous young guy she meets at cafes several times a week to practice her Italian. No, perhaps it’s too early to consider this, she reasons.  Instead she flirts and eats, flirts and eats.  And eats.  She is happy – happy! – to gain twenty-four pounds during the Italian part of her adventure because, well, she needed to gain the weight.  Can you guess yet which book I classify as nonfiction and which as fantasy?

In the appealing (and beautifully written) Eat, Pray, Love, the author gets in touch with her hedonistic self in Italy, achieves enlightenment in India (a land-speed record, I might add) and, in Indonesia, hooks up with a dashing, wealthy older man who wants nothing more than the privilege of adoring her.

Meanwhile, our Nomad is being questioned by nasty guards at the El Salvador border, examining her ambivalence toward her own Jewishness in Israel, learning about the caste system in Bali and, country by country, year by year, opening her heart and mind to the cultures of the world. She doesn’t reach satori or find the love of her life. Instead, she slowly, slowly, becomes a better person.  

Readers ran, cash in hand, to buy hundreds of thousands of copies of the fantasy book (that would be the one in which the woman gains weight and is happy about it).  They pretty much ignored the nonfiction book.  The legions of E, P, L readers wanted a “true” story – after all, they bought nonfiction not a novel – but really they wanted a dream.  They wanted to read about the luminous young woman who found everything she was looking for – everything any woman could possibly be looking for – in six months flat.  They were uninterested in reading about the earnest middle-aged woman who camped out in youth hostels and lived out of her backpack while venturing deeply into other people’s lives. 

This bothers me – the enormous popularity of the fantasy, the blip on the screen of the other book – not because I do not like fantasy.  I do.  And not because I did not like E, P, L.  I did.  It bothers me because nonfiction has a hard enough time making its way in the world without that kind of competition.  Books like E, P, L raise the bar for readers’ expectations.  They will not be satisfied with stories of mere mortals making their hesitant way through the world.  They want writers who look like movie stars living out the kind of adventures that virtually no one but that writer has or ever will have. 

This reminds me of Norm the carpenter.  He is on a program I used to watch religiously called “This Old House.”  The home improvement show, which still airs on TV, was, I think, the first of its kind and was, for a while, wildly popular with the PBS crowd.  Norm the carpenter was an ordinary-looking guy – okay, less than ordinary –  maybe in his late forties.  He was bulky without being buff, wore dorky glasses and dorkier shirts and spoke with an annoyingly nasal Boston accent.  He was a great carpenter, though, a hard worker.  He really listened to the homeowners whose houses he was helping to remodel.  For most of the show, you could see him hefting boards or mortising joints or setting windows.  Here was a guy you could trust, the kind of workman you wouldn’t hesitate to leave alone in your house.

But who would want Norm the carpenter now when they could have the deliciously swarthy hottie who stars on “Take Home Handyman” or the GQ-like hunk on “Trading Spaces,” his tool belt slung low over slender hips, his hair expertly rumpled, as if he just got out of bed (yours?).  Fantasy carpenters!  Can they use a miter saw?  Drive a straight nail?  Who cares! 

Our heads are full of fantasy that masquerades as reality: the sexy carpenter, the beautiful author to whom all good and amazing things happen.  And then, of course, the endless sea of heavily plotted, heavily edited “reality” shows.  Reality, which (I admit)  sometimes is not so great anyway, is now seeming even dingier, drabber, less exciting, less worthy of our attention. When fantasy is consistently, doggedly presented as reality, poor, embattled nonfiction has to face yet another opponent, one that it is mighty hard to defeat.

LAUREN KESSLER’s latest book, Dancing with Rose, won the Pacific Northwest Book Award and was named one of the Best Books of 2007 by Library Journal.  She is the founder and editor of Etude.