Hey Drumloops -- that's a kick-ass read. I finished it just before Christmas.

I was so touched by What is the What that I really hoped it would be a memoir rather than a novel. As I read, I thought back to James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, where the memoir was determined to be a novel after the fact, so one could never know which of the most affecting parts were true

Eggers tells us in a preface that the book is a novel, but "not so very different" from Deng's own experience.

That said, if in fact the "basic events" of Deng's life are true to the story, it's still an amazing, amazing story.