While publishers prepped to review "Three Cups of Tea" for inaccuracies, author Greg Mortenson admitted Monday "there were some omissions" in the nonfiction memoir.
"When you re-create the scenes, you have my recollections, the different memories of those involved ... and sometimes things come out different," he told Outside magazine. "If we included everything I did from 1993 to 2003 it would take three books to write it."
Mortenson has been under fire since "60 Minutes" aired a report Sunday that suggested parts of "Three Cups of Tea," which has sold more than 4 million copies, did not accurately describe his experience building schools for girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The news outlet also raised questions about how Mortenson managed the finances of his Montana-based nonprofit, Central Asia Institute, alleging that many of the 170 schools he claims to have built "were empty, built by somebody else, or simply didn't exist at all."
The scandal has repercussions, not just for Mortenson, but also for the publishing industry, which has been criticized for insufficient fact checking. Some worry the "60 Minutes" story may hurt the people Mortenson's nonprofit is trying to help.
When Outside magazine asked Mortenson if there were factual errors in "Three Cups of Tea," he answered, "I'm not a journalist. I don't take a lot of notes."
When Mortenson first approached publishers with his book idea in 2002, he said he was told the "story's great but the writing sucks." He then teamed up with journalist David Oliver Relin, who helped him to do hundreds of interviews.
"He did nearly all the writing," Mortenson said. "I helped him piece together the whole time line, and from that we started creating the narrative arc and everything."
Mortenson said parts of the book are not accurate. He took literary license.
"Rather than me going two or three times to one place, he (Relin) would synthesize it into one trip," he said. "I would squawk about it and be told that it would all work out."
Mortenson regrets not taking time off from his day-to-day work to focus on the book, he said.
"In those days I was overseas all the time, and also trying to raise money," he said. "I was trying to raise a family, be gone most of the year, and work 16- to 20-hour days without stopping."
Baltimore Sun reporter Dave Rosenthal pointed out that many of the allegations "60 Minutes" has leveled at Mortenson "fall into the category of poetic license — collapsing time to tell a better story."
Many memoir writers take such liberties, Rosenthal argued.
"I really don't mind that," he said. "But an author should acknowledge the practice in a preface or elsewhere in the book."
Other discrepancies, though, like empty schools and an allegedly fabricated Taliban kidnapping, can not be so easily explained away, said Alexandra Petri of The Washington Post.
"That's like learning your cookbook is condensing the cooking time, or that your Bible does not accurately depict the way the Earth was formed," she said.
Anushay Hossain predicted the scandal could do significant damage to how people feel about investing in Central Asia — a region they already feel hopeless about.
"If this were just about one author's reputation, the story would have few repercussions outside the publishing world," said Michelle Goldberg of The Daily Beast. "But Mortenson is not just a memoirist — he's also the single most famous champion of the transformative power of education for girls in poor countries. If his downfall leads to skepticism about his cause, it would be not just a scandal, but a tragedy."
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