Esquire Publishes a Diary That Isn’t - from The New Yorker overnight

After Heath Ledger was found dead in his SoHo apartment on Jan. 22, David Granger, the editor in chief of Esquire magazine, dispatched a writer named Lisa Taddeo to report on the actor’s final days.
Related:

Heath Ledger, Actor, Is Found Dead at 28 (January 23, 2008)
Times Topics: Heath Ledger
The Article from Esquire.com

Her article, published in the April issue, which will be on newstands next week, finds Mr. Ledger eating Moroccan food with Jack Nicholson in London, returning to New York and partying at the downtown nightspot Beatrice Inn, eating steak and eggs at a cafe in Little Italy and wolfing down a banana-nut muffin as his last morsel of food.

None of this is exactly true. “The Last Days of Heath Ledger,” written in the first person as if it were Mr. Ledger’s own diary, is a fictionalized account of his last days in London and New York and ponders the indignities of celebrity.
“It becomes theatrically important, after you die, what your last few days are like,” the article begins.

Skeptical readers might surmise that Ms. Taddeo didn’t turn up anything in her reporting and turned to a gimmick to get the story in print. But Mr. Granger insists that the piece, which is labeled fiction, is neither stunt nor gimmick.
“It’s an earnest effort,” he said, adding that the magazine has tried to tackle fiction using a nonfiction playbook before. “We’ve been trying to assign fiction,” he said, “to make it topical, relevant. To go to writers with a headline or an idea.”
Rest of story.