A dishy new book purports to reveal the inner secrets of the Trump White House — and has already provoked President Donald Trump to a furious response.

But how much of it should we believe?

The book in question is Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, by longtime media writer Michael Wolff. Though just released this morning, it’s already been dominating the political news cycle for a few days. New York magazine published a lengthy excerpt from it Wednesday, the Hollywood Reporter ran a column by Wolff on the book Thursday, and the Guardian, the Washington Post, and CNBC have all run quotes from it.

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, meanwhile, has come under fire from the Trump family for quotes he seems to have given to Wolff. And the Washington Post’s Carol Leonnig writes this morning that Trump’s lawyers have sent a cease-and-desist letter to the book’s publisher, demanding to stop its publication.

The excerpts from the book released earlier this week tell a mostly familiar big-picture story of chaos during the presidential transition and in Trump’s early months in the White House. Wolff spruces things up, though, with new quotes, anecdotes, and purported personal details — many of which are eye-popping and unflattering.

Indeed, some of the things Wolff describes in the excerpts sound so outlandish — and also happen to be so hazily sourced — that there’s already a vigorous discussion in the political world about how, exactly, this book should be interpreted. As fact? As “trashy tabloid fiction,” as the White House argues? Or as something in between?

From what I’ve read so far, my view is that we should interpret the book as a compendium of gossip Wolff heard. A fair amount of it does clearly seem to be accurate. Wolff did get access to the White House — reporters have seen him coming and going there this year. He seems to have been in the room for some of the events he depicts. Bannon evidently talked to Wolff a great deal, and he hasn’t disputed any of the controversial quotes attributed to him that have already earned him a presidential tongue lashing.

But of course gossip is often wrong or inaccurate. Sources can misstate the facts accidentally, or deliberately. (A source for one of Wolff’s anecdotes, Sam Nunberg, has previously admitted to spreading made-up Trump campaign gossip.) And we don’t really know how much effort Wolff put into trying to nail down whether the juicy stuff we heard was actually true. Some anecdotes and details in the book don’t seem to match known facts; others seem outright impossible to verify. Some people are disputing quotes attributed to them. And Wolff is often deliberately vague about his sourcing.

In other words, the book does seem to be a collection of stuff Wolff heard. How much of that stuff is actually true is a different question — one that’s much tougher to answer.

Who is Michael Wolff?

Wolff is a well-connected New York columnist who’s covered the media industry for decades. He’s written columns for outlets like New York magazine, Vanity Fair, and the Hollywood Reporter and has several books under his belt (including two about wealthy media moguls).

He’s also long been a controversial figure. For instance, in a 2004 article for the New Republic, journalist Michelle Cottle took stock of Wolff’s work. After describing his “quick wit, dizzying writing style, and willingness to say absolutely anything about anybody” in “a catty, caustic way,” and his fixation “on culture, style, buzz, and money, money, money,” Cottle essentially argues that Wolff is more of a gossip compiler than a rigorous reporter:

Much to the annoyance of Wolff's critics, the scenes in his columns aren't recreated so much as created — springing from Wolff's imagination rather than from actual knowledge of events. Even Wolff acknowledges that conventional reporting isn't his bag. Rather, he absorbs the atmosphere and gossip swirling around him at cocktail parties, on the street, and especially during those long lunches at Michael's. "He's around town enough to have those insights, to spot people, to come across [pieces of information]," says a friend. ... On a meta level, Wolff is resented for not playing by the rules of his chosen profession. He has a reputation for busting embargoes and burning sources by putting off-the-record comments on the record.

Wolff’s prominence in the New York media world likely means he was on Trump’s radar for some time. And Trump’s team gave him access last year — Wolff got news-making interviews with Trump himself late in the primary season (in which Trump struggled to answer a question about Brexit), and with Bannon during the transition (in which the incoming White House chief strategist bragged that “darkness is good” and laid out a plan to build “an entirely new political movement”).

So it’s not entirely surprising that Wolff would land a great deal of access to the new White House in 2017 — indeed, he claims to have landed “something like a semi-permanent seat on a couch in the West Wing” with Trump’s “non-disapproval,” and to have conducted more than 200 interviews.

What does Michael Wolff’s Trump book say?

From the excerpts released so far, the big-picture takeaways appear to be that the White House is a chaotic mess, that many people working there hate each other and also disdain Trump, and that Trump can be both ridiculous and mean. But some more specific tidbits that have drawn attention are:

Bannon opined to Wolff that Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer in search of dirt on Hillary Clinton was “treasonous,” speculated the elder Trump may have been involved in the meeting as well, and asserted that Jared Kushner was involved in some “greasy” business that could expose him to money laundering charges. (Trump already responded to this with a furious official White House statement denouncing Bannon.)

Katie Walsh, a deputy chief of staff who lasted only about two months in Trump’s White House, is quoted saying that working with Trump was “like trying to figure out what a child wants.” (Some reporters say she’s disputing the quote.)

One excerpt claims to describe Trump’s methodology for getting “friends’ wives into bed,” which he purportedly likes to say is “one of the things that made life worth living.” (The process involves a speakerphone.)

Wolff makes some allusions to Trump’s mental state: “Everybody was painfully aware of the increasing pace of his repetitions. It used to be inside of 30 minutes he’d repeat, word-for-word and expression-for-expression, the same three stories — now it was within 10 minutes.” (“At Mar-a-Lago, just before the new year, a heavily made-up Trump failed to recognize a succession of old friends,” he adds in his Hollywood Reporter column.)

Another claims that Trump has “a longtime fear of being poisoned,” which supposedly explains his love of McDonald’s.

Wolff writes that Mark Corallo, who served as a spokesperson for Trump’s legal team before resigning this summer, privately confided that he thought an Air Force One meeting in which Trump’s team strategized about how to respond to the news that Don Jr. had met a Russian lawyer “represented a likely obstruction of justice.”

According to another tidbit, when former Fox News chief Roger Ailes suggested John Boehner as a potential chief of staff for Trump during the transition, Trump responded, “Who’s that?”

Wolff claims that Ivanka Trump made fun of her father’s hair, and has said to Kushner that she wants to be the first woman president. He also claims that Melania Trump was in tears, “and not of joy,” on election night when learning Trump would win.

So ... is all this true?

Overall, the book’s most eyebrow-raising claims appear to reside on a spectrum ranging at least from “true” to “highly dubious gossip.”

What appears to be the biggest news in the book so far — Bannon’s provocative speculation about the Trump family and the Russia investigation — does appear to be, at least, accurate quotation of him. Bannon isn’t disputing any of the quotes, and Breitbart News, the website he runs, straightforwardly wrote them up on Wednesday. Whether Bannon’s claims have any validity, though, isn’t clear.

Additionally, for at least some of the events Wolff describes, he appears to have been in the room. For instance, Wolff spends a good chunk of the New York magazine excerpt describing, in detail, a dinner Bannon and Ailes shared in January. Some reporters questioned how Wolff could have written such a vivid scene, and the passage didn’t make his sourcing clear. But per Axios’s Mike Allen, Wolff was in the room, and in fact hosted the dinner.

Other tidbits are more problematic. For instance, the suggestion that Trump didn’t know who John Boehner was in 2016 appears highly dubious. Trump has tweeted about Boehner 26 times (once even mocking his occasional habit of crying) and played golf with him. It seems likely that someone told this juicy anecdote to Wolff — perhaps Ailes, whom Wolff has covered for years, who was the other party to the conversation, and who died in May. But it’s not clear whether Wolff bothered to check if it made sense, if Trump may have momentarily misheard Ailes’s remark, or whether something else may have been going on.

Some sourcing is also troublesome. Wolff quotes former Trump adviser Sam Nunberg purportedly describing an attempt to explain the Constitution to Trump. “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head,” Nunberg is quoted as saying. But just a few months ago, Nunberg bragged to a reporter that he made up what he said was a false story about Chris Christie getting Trump McDonald’s during the campaign.

Other sourcing, such as for the Jared and Ivanka anecdotes, is hazy. Did Wolff rigorously fact-check what he heard here, or might it have been a bit too good to check? Katie Walsh, meanwhile, says she’s disputing some quotes attributed to her — but whether this is a case of factual inaccuracy on Wolff’s part or the phenomenon known as “source remorse” (when someone regrets saying too much to a reporter and seeks to disavow it) isn’t clear. (Axios’s Allen writes this morning that Wolff taped many of his interviews, including at least one with Walsh, which could certainly bolster his case.)

The bigger-picture issue here is that the excerpts released so far suggest Wolff used a writing style common to major reported political books — the dramatic reconstruction of scenes and sometimes dialogue in a you-are-there style, with his specific sourcing for many claims omitted.

That makes for a more entertaining read, but it provides less transparency in the sourcing of specific claims and therefore makes it more difficult to get any sense of just how solid Wolff’s information may be. Which scenes was he in the room for? If he was in the room, did he record audio and nail exact quotes, or use some combination of notes, memory, and dramatic license? What did he hear from sources with firsthand knowledge? What did he hear from people with secondhand knowledge?

In the end, here’s New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman’s assessment of the book:

Thin but readable. Well written. Several things that are true and several that are not. Light in fact-checking and copy-editing. — Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) January 3, 2018

My recommendation for reading Wolff

Overall, my advice for reading the book is to look closely at what Wolff reveals about the sourcing of each of his claims.

The most reliable stuff is, well, stuff people said on the record to Wolff directly. If the quotations directly quote people telling him things and identify them, they are probably accurate. (That doesn’t necessarily mean what these sources are saying is accurate, but the quotes themselves are probably right.) Again, Bannon really does seem to have said all that stuff.

Similarly, look for clues about which scenes Wolff was actually in the room for — even though, in the passages released so far, his opaque descriptions of his sourcing can make that rather difficult.

As the sourcing grows hazier, you should probably add grains of salt accordingly. Of course, anonymity is often crucial for sources to speak candidly. But it also can allow people to spread untrue or inaccurate information. And given Wolff’s weakness for gossip and the questions raised about some of his juicy tidbits so far, a skeptical eye seems warranted.