on authoriality

Wrote this a couple of days back but forgot to post it and then watched something else which reminded me of it. You didn't need to know that but i needed you to know that.

i just watched The Night Listener, if you haven't seen it it's about an author who gets a call from a 14 year old boy whose existence is never proved. The boy has allegedly used writing therapy to overcome the trauma of having been subject to paedophilic pornography films and being violated in them. He writes about this in the book. In the film Robin Williams says if it's a lie that it is a sick way of promoting a book. But really, aside from the possible terror of the reality, what is the importance of it being a real story? i always like to think it would be fun to pretend to be someone else when on a plane or when you meet people travelling but would i be upset or disappointed if i found that stories that i had been told were lies aside from the fact itself that i had been lied to? Is it plausibility which is important? Is it to do with how emotionally invested we get with the story? When you study history, or rather when i did i never got emotionally involved because i know that that is how it turned out and that has, in part, created the world we live in, and to an extent a true story does the same. A fictional story could have ended differently, we wonder perhaps why the author chose for it to end in the way it did. Hollywood obviously thinks that it is important because they always say when a story is based on real events. Is it maybe part of modern fiction that it has to be plausible and if we know that it happened then we can trust it and we feel more tied to it emotionally because it is real people? In the case of the film though it wasn't important if the back-story was real was it, it was just the fact that the author lied.

Authoriality confuses me.