The truth is, Greg Bottoms is a liar. Just not in the conventional sense of the word. Not in the “I am not who I say I am” sense. He didn’t fabricate a million little pieces of his past in order to push a best-selling memoir. Not in the “it depends on what your definition of the word is is” sense either. You won’t find him crossing his fingers behind his back. And certainly not in the “byline: Stephen Glass” sense. What he writes is his own.

Greg Bottoms is a liar only insofar as any creative nonfiction writer is: He pursues truth through the lens of an inescapable subjectivity. For the past decade or so, he has thought carefully about how a writer uses the facts: salvaging them, preserving them, contextualizing them, personalizing them, even ignoring them. He has written about a small crowd of people’s lives—his schizophrenic brother, a suicidal writer, and outsider artists, among others—and in each instance he has tried to get beneath the surface of their stories, below the preconceived notions and societal assumptions, down to some bedrock of truth. “I think writing ought to have a kind of honesty to it, a sort of courage, but not a courage to be titillating or coarse, just a courage to keep going until you feel like you’ve gotten to the heart of the matter, which is not easy to do and can be sort of painful,” he says.

But the truth is elusive. It’s open to interpretation, as Bottoms has discovered most recently and pointedly with his new book, a memoir about outsider art and artists, published by the University of Chicago Press in the spring. In The Colorful Apocalypse, a chronicle of his journey into the lives of three artists—the late Howard Finster, William Thomas Thompson, and Norbert Kox—Bottoms explores the creative impulse, in the face of disorder, chaos, madness, and despair, to make sense of life through art. The book, which took Bottoms six years to write, is also about the fundamental act of storytelling itself and the precarious nature of writing about another person’s life.

“There’s a kind of self-consciousness in the book about the making of narrative and the making of story, which is considerably more difficult when you’re writing about real people,” Bottoms says. “Great care is required, and I think no matter how much care you take there’s some part of you that thinks, ‘Ah, did I get that right? Did I do that right? Was this even mine to say?’”

Bottoms was born in Hampton, Virginia, just as his mother and father had been, in 1970. “I come from a place where people move down the street,” he says, and indeed, his mother, grandmother, and aunt still live there, in the Tidewater region of Virginia, in the suburban New South. His father and his older brother, Michael, do not, and it is the long, dark, sometimes violent, and complicated narrative leading to their absence that is the subject of Bottoms’s first book, the memoir Angelhead (Crown, 2000), which he began writing in 1997 while pursuing his MFA in fiction at the University of Virginia (UVA) in Charlottesville.

“My brother saw the face of God,” Bottoms writes at the beginning of Angelhead. “You never recover from a trauma like that. He was fourteen, on LSD, shouting for help in the darkness of his room in our new suburban home. I was ten.” He goes on to describe how his brother, once considered the “good-looking bad boy” of the neighborhood, slipped further and further away from reality. First there were the obsessions, with heavy metal music, martial arts, snakes—odd behavior, unsettling, but easily swept under the rug of adolescence. Then came the violence, to himself and to others, and finally—over a period of years that included a false admission of murder, two tries at suicide, and a diagnosis of acute paranoid schizophrenia—an attempt to burn down his family’s house with them still inside. Bottoms’s father, who had worked hard to establish a good life for his family in the suburbs, died of lung cancer before a judge sentenced Michael to thirty years in the psychiatric ward of a Virginia maximum-security prison.

Reviews of Angelhead appeared in the usual places—Publishers Weekly (“one of the most harrowing portraits of madness in recent memory”), Esquire, Salon, even CNN.com—but also in medical journals like Psychology Today and the British Medical Journal. It was almost universally praised for its honesty, for Bottom’s unflinching look at mental illness. But it was also a juicy story, attractive to journalists looking for a little drama, and Bottoms’s personal life—and the life of his sick brother—was suddenly open to misinterpretation. “It made me very uneasy. I felt like there’s a way that that kind of trauma memoir or confessional prose or family-chaos-mayhem-made-into-a-story goes out into the world. There’s almost a template for its reception. It started even before the publication of the book,” he says, referring to the press release that he received from Crown.

“It was almost this celebration of what seemed salable about it—‘a devastating portrait of…’—like it was this rock-and-roll book: ‘Man, this is so edgy, what an edgy story about this crazy guy.’ And I thought, ‘What? I didn’t say that. I’m saying he was my brother and it’s complicated and I loved him very much.’ All of a sudden here came this marketing-speak, and it just went out into the world. I thought, ‘Well, I’ve participated in this,’ so it made me deeply uneasy.”

Adding to Bottoms’s concern about the marketing of the memoir was his anxiety about being portrayed as some kind of trumped-up survivor. In his new book, he recounts being interviewed about Angelhead and feeling like a sellout. “I felt…that I had done nothing more than sell my tragedy in an au courant literary form, the trauma memoir, which courts, in this cultural moment, self-aggrandizement, even if that self-aggrandizement is half-buried under irony or self-deprecation.” The reason the book received the kind of reception it did, Bottoms sometimes felt, was not because of its literary merit but at least partially because it was a tragic tale.

Bottoms was still fielding interviewers’ questions about Angelhead when his next book, Sentimental, Heartbroken Rednecks (Context Books), a collection of stories set in the South that blurs the lines between autobiography, fiction, and essay, was published—just days before September 11, 2001. It did not have an auspicious start, and no one can fail to recognize at least one possible reason why, although Bottoms immediately disregards such excuses. “For me to say, ‘Gee, my book didn’t sell very well because there was a catastrophe,’ to see my own pathetic little story as mattering in all that is just ragingly narcissistic, so whatever, you write and the world goes on and sometimes people notice what you do and sometimes they don’t, and there you have it.”

A brief review in the New York Times pointed to two biographical pieces in the middle of Sentimental, Heartbroken Rednecks (which was billed by its publisher as “stories”) as lending a “hodgepodge feel to Bottoms’s book—evidence, perhaps, of a serious talent still racked by growing pains.” While the reviewer, Jonathan Miles, had a point—Bottoms himself says he disagrees with the way the book was packaged—the review glossed over the subjects of those two pieces: one about the late Southern writer Breece D’J Pancake, which was reprinted in this magazine; the other about James Hampton Jr., a janitor in Washington, D.C., whose 180-piece sculpture, “The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly,” was discovered in a rented garage after his death.

“A Seat for the Coming Savior” (later titled “Patron Saint of Thrown-Away Things: An Essay on Devotion” for a revised paperback edition of the book, published in May by Shoemaker & Hoard) was not the first time Bottoms had written about a so-called outsider artist. In the MFA program at UVA, while Bottoms was researching schizophrenia, dementia praecox, and the history of asylums and hospitals for Angelhead, he “bumped into” the topic of outsider art almost immediately and began collecting notes about three Christian visionary artists.

The first was the famous Reverend Howard Finster, an outsider artist in Pennville, Georgia, about whom Bottoms had written a short essay for the short-lived online magazine Feed. Bottoms was interested in Finster because, as a teenager in Virginia, he and his friends had seen the artist in a documentary about the mid-1980s music scene in Athens, Georgia, and something about Finster’s bigger-than-life persona struck a chord with him. The second was Greenville, South Carolina, artist William Thomas Thompson, who, in the late 1980s, after contracting a mysterious nerve disorder, traveled to Hawaii for treatment, attended a church service at which he glimpsed a vision of hell—a fire-and-brimstone, Four-Horsemen-of-the-Apocalypse type of vision—then spent three years painting a three-hundred-foot mural of the book of Revelation. And the third was Norbert Kox of New Franken, Wisconsin, once a member of the Waterloo Outlaws biker gang, who looked at his father one night and saw a vision of a crucified Jesus, wrote “nine hundred pages of Christian prophecy,” as Bottoms describes it, and began to paint “apocalyptic visual parables.”

When Bottoms heard the news that Finster had died in October 2001, he was living in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and teaching creative writing to undergraduates at Sweet Briar College—his first teaching job after graduating from UVA. He was driving through the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, listening to the radio, when he heard the report. It was raining, and as he pulled his car over to the side of the road, he decided then and there that he would go to Georgia for Finster’s memorial service—held at his four-acre Christian “visionary” art environment, Paradise Gardens—and begin what would be almost a six-year journey into the always strange and sometimes dark and contradictory world of outsider art, a journey chronicled in The Colorful Apocalypse.

Morally indefensible—that’s what Janet Malcolm calls the work of the journalist in her seminal book The Journalist and the Murderer (Knopf, 1990). “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness.” Malcolm’s point is that the journalist-subject dynamic weighs heavily in favor of the journalist, who has the power to interpret the subject’s story. Bottoms quotes the passage in The Colorful Apocalypse to demonstrate the difficulty of writing about another person’s life.

To write about Finster, Thompson, and Kox, Bottoms traveled to Georgia, South Carolina, and Wisconsin, to unfamiliar places to talk with unfamiliar people—artists who have painted images of the Virgin Mary as a skeleton with the severed head of Jesus Christ on her chest, for example, or who have built sculptures of dead babies and whose views on religion, spirituality, sexuality, abortion, and other issues Bottoms struggled to understand. (On his Web site, artist William Thomas Thompson offers a statement of his beliefs. “I believe that the so-called mother church is a false religion,” he writes. “I believe the dynasty of Popes to be the Antichrist. I believe that America is the real promise Land and breadbasket for the entire world. I believe Revelation prophecy is largely fulfilled already.” Kox, too, introduces himself on his Web site, stating that his artwork illustrates how “much of modern Christianity has been duped by the Adversary and has actually become the religion of the Antichrist.”)

“I didn’t go down there thinking, ‘Gee, my own confusion is going to be a part of this story,’” Bottoms says. “But once I started to talk to these people I felt this need to not present something that felt like thesis or synthesis so much as encounter—an openness to encounter itself—and also a willingness to see other people’s perspectives and not just stand in easy judgment.”

To accomplish this, Bottoms included himself in the narrative, together with all of his misgivings, misunderstandings, and missteps along the way. (The book is classified as a travel memoir.) He also made very clear to his subjects that he was a journalist writing a story. “I feel like I was pretty up front and honest all the time with these people and actually took care with the way I was writing about them,” he says.

Bottoms reveled in the philosophical implications of narrative and embraced “this idea of life-writing, of biography and autobiography and memoir, of telling other people’s stories and telling your story and making their story a part of your story,” he says. So, armed with a tape recorder and notebook, Bottoms talked to the artists about their work. But mostly he listened.

He wasn’t Truman Capote in Holcomb, Kansas, befriending—and, some say, taking advantage of—murder suspects whose execution formed the perfect ending to his “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood. Nor was he James Agee, whose paralyzing guilt while living with sharecroppers in Alabama influenced every word of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. But Bottoms did take his role seriously and tried to offer his readers a documentary of sorts. “To me, these artists’ stories were complicated human stories,” he says. “I don’t think of any of these people, anybody in this book, as aberrant or strange, but there is a way you can look at them and say they are obviously this or obviously that.”

Bottoms had run into those kinds of assumptions before, back in Hampton, Virginia, and wanted to avoid them. “The way in which my brother’s story was told in newspapers and neighborhood gossip and became a kind of suburban tale told among kids—it was wrong, it was too simplified,” Bottoms says. “And I’m suggesting it’s the same here with these people’s lives.”

While his role as a writer—one who would look and listen and ask questions about the artists’ intentions, take what he encountered, and add it to his own views and experiences—was clear to him, Bottoms was concerned that his intentions were not so clear to his subjects. “I think they, in some ways, perceived me as a vehicle to disseminate their message, so I wanted to keep being honest with them about who I was,” he says. “I think they assumed I would reel off something promotional.”

The publication of The Colorful Apocalypse was met first with reviews—Sven Birkerts called it “an intensely  searching tribute”—and then a flurry of impassioned e-mails and letters from Kox and Thompson (who have collaborated on a number of paintings, including “Idolatry: The Drugging of the Nations,” which is reproduced on the cover of Bottoms’s book) denouncing it as “a compilation of lies and half-truths.” Posted on Publishers-weekly, Amazon, Powells, and other Web sites and blogs were customer reviews, comments, and even letters from the artists to the University of Chicago Press demanding a recall of the book. Bottoms’s descriptions of paintings were called into question, as were paraphrased statements and direct quotes, which Bottoms says he has recorded conversations and notes to support.

“Greg Bottoms has twisted the truth and fabricated much of the information in the book,” Kox stated in a message on Publishers Weekly’s online Talkback feature. “His colorful inventions are in many cases total falsehood. The Colorful Apocalypse is a blatant example of inaccurate and deceitful writing.”

In his reply to the artists, which was posted on Powells and later removed, Perry Cartwright, the manager of contracts and subsidiary rights for the University of Chicago Press, stated that the press would be happy to correct specific factual errors in the book if it was reprinted. (Bottoms has admitted to one erroneous description—of the numerical significance of a detail in a Kox-Thompson collaboration. “That’s the full fruit of their complaints,” Bottoms says.) “From your letters it seems that there is a significant misunderstanding about the essence of this book,” Cartwright added. “A book of this type is by its very nature subjective, so it is entirely possible, and not deceptive, that his views of what he saw will not always be in total agreement with the views and opinions of you or other artists and observers.”

The author himself took it a little more personally. “Being called a liar really bugs the heck out of me,” he wrote in his reply to Kox’s review of the book on Amazon. “Only the most frighteningly zealous among us believe they own ‘the truth.’ I don’t believe I do, and this book about my experiences, understandings, confusions, arguments, and insights is in no way meant to supplant the artists’ own narratives of who they are, what they believe, and what they represent.”

Executive editor Susan Bielstein says the University of Chicago Press has no plans to recall the book. “We prize our relationship with Greg Bottoms.”

Burlington, Vermont, is a long way from Hampton, Virginia. Light-years away, says Bottoms, who since 2003 has taught literary nonfiction at the university there, which sits on a hill at the foot of the Green Mountains. It’s also a long way from his family and from the outsider artists he came to know during the past six years. Although New York City—with its agents and editors and publicists and reviewers and best-seller lists—is only three hundred miles south, one gets the sense that Bottoms is not a frequent visitor. Nor does he worry much about the business side of publishing it represents.

“Commercial expectations seem separate from my own impulse to write,” he says. “I feel like my books are kind of willfully literary—not fancy, I try to be totally accessible—but a book about outsider artists? A book about a schizophrenic kid? A book of essays about a suicidal writer and a janitor who made a gigantic sculpture? It seems strange to me sometimes that anybody reads them at all. I’ll write another book after this one, I’ll write another book after that one, and I daresay probably none of them will be commercially successful. I can’t imagine that they would be. And that’s okay with me.”

Still, the controversy surrounding his latest book has taken its toll. “This has been terribly deflating to me,” Bottoms says. “I’ve felt pretty shitty since the thing came out.” But if, as the author’s own story illustrates, every nonfiction writer is, in the eyes of someone somewhere, a liar, then Bottoms is the best kind of liar. He’s a writer who avoids the “automatic and easy assemblage of the facts” by digging below the surface of the story, who keeps writing until he’s staring straight into the face of the only truth that is truly indisputable: his own.