Lance Armstrong is a liar, or at least was a liar, though the old motherly wisdom here probably stands: once, always. And depending on one’s perspective, his athletic accomplishments are at best tainted and at worst entirely invalidated—though you try riding a bike up the Col du Tourmalet. His accomplishments as a humanitarian and fundraiser, meanwhile, are surely somehow altered by his having been unmasked as a cheater and bully, though they may endure as valuable contributions and even be celebrated as such. But what about his standing and reputation as a writer?

First, a point of clarification: Lance Armstrong is not a writer, or at least not a person who sat down by himself at a desk—pulling his hair out as he fussed with sentence structure—to write the two memoirs published in his name, “It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life” and “Every Second Counts.” Both were written with Sally Jenkins, a sportswriter for the Washington Post. Neither book hides that fact; Jenkins’s name is on the cover of each, but printed smaller than that of the main attraction. Lance Armstrong’s name sold these books, and in the parlance of popular discussion, they are his books, just as the President’s speeches are the President’s, regardless of who wrote them. And, like everything else related to the once great and now cracked Empire of Lance, the books—big sellers in their time—have been dusted off, given a second look, and have come under attack.

Last week, in California, two plaintiffs, Rob Stutzman and Jonathan Wheeler, filed a class-action lawsuit against Armstrong, as well as the publishers Penguin and Random House, alleging that, according to the filing, they “were misled by Defendants’ statements and purchased Defendant Armstrong’s books based upon the false belief that they were true and honest works of nonfiction.” It also claims that the defendants “knew or should have known that these books were works of fiction.” (The co-author, Jenkins, is not named in the suit.) The plaintiffs are demanding a full refund of the purchase price of the two books—for themselves and any other Californians who want to join in the suit—along with other damages and attorneys’ fees.

Legal writing, save for the prose of a precious few lawyers and judges, has rarely contributed to the literary enterprise. Yet there are times when legal proceedings have helped the public at large to reconsider the experience of reading in commercial, emotional, and intellectual terms. Judge John Woolsey wrote a brave and sensitive opinion when charges of obscenity were brought against James Joyce’s “Ulysses” in United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, becoming a kind of spokesman for the American lay reader, not only helping to give people wide access to the book but also offering a guide in appreciating it as “a somewhat tragic and very powerful commentary on the inner lives of men and women.” This filing against Armstrong does not meet those erudite standards, nor is it likely to weigh in the history of literature, yet it nonetheless manages to frame important questions of modern book buying and reading.

Amid the technical language of the suit—which runs to more than fifty pages and contains a startlingly comprehensive catalogue of Armstrong’s public and private obfuscations over the years—are professions of wounded emotions, in which the alleged wrong perpetrated against the two plaintiffs is described as a kind of personal trespass. Of one plaintiff, we learn:

Stutzman bought the book in California and read it cover to cover. Although Stutzman does not buy or read many books, he found Armstrong’s book incredibly compelling and recommended the book to several friends.

The violations here are legion, starting with the fact that Stutzman, an apparent bibliophobe, was tricked into eagerly reading an entire book, then conned into actually liking it, and finally was compelled to make an utter ass of himself by recommending this now manifestly fiction-filled book to his friends. In the realm of wrongs, both personal and cosmic, this may seem a minor one, but the filing drives home the damage these books seem to have done to the plaintiffs, adding that after Armstrong stepped into Oprah Winfrey’s mass-media confessional, “Stutzman felt duped, cheated and betrayed,” and “the disappointed Wheeler felt cheated and betrayed.” (Of the actual legal merits of the case I have no expertise nor opinion, though similar class-action suits—one involving Greg Mortenson’s disputed memoir “Three Cups of Tea,” and another centering on Jimmy Carter’s “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid”—have failed to make it to trial. Another case, brought against Random House in regard to James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces,” was settled out of court.)

Both plaintiffs, it seems plain from the language of their lawyers, would not be receptive to a kind of lit-theory ambivalence that suggests that writing—be it fiction, history, poetry, biography, etc.—is, by its nature as artistic expression, both partly true and partly false. Nor would they take comfort from the idea that there is a nearly uniform level of untruth in the self-written accounts of most everyone’s lives—lies, omissions, misdirections, forgotten episodes, and spared feelings. Or as Daniel Mendelsohn notes, in his essay in the magazine about the rise of the memoir, quoting Sigmund Freud, “What makes all autobiographies worthless is, after all, their mendacity.”

The equation for the plaintiffs, instead, is more simple: when Lance Armstrong wrote the following sentences in “It’s Not About the Bike,” he was lying, and this lie spoils the book and makes its classification as nonfiction both false and misleading:

Doping is an unfortunate fact of life in cycling, or any other endurance sport for that matter. Inevitably, some teams and riders feel it’s like nuclear weapons—they have to do it to stay competitive within the peloton. I never felt that way, and certainly after chemo the idea of putting anything foreign in my body was especially repulsive.

Certainly we should cringe at this passage, because we now know it to be false, but also because the lie becomes dirtier and sadder when we see Armstrong bullying us with the emotional and rhetorical power of his struggle with cancer. (Of course, this pitiless strong-arming is just what Armstrong has been doing all these years, but seeing it here in prose makes it all the more stark.) But the books are also full of what remain true stories: about his cancer treatments, his incredible hours-long workouts, his strategic brilliance on the bike, and the joy he felt at starting a family. Thus the lawsuit misapplies the conventions of genre by insisting that because they contain false information, these books should be considered fiction. (That insults novels at least as much as it insults these books.) They are not “fake memoirs” in the manner of “A Million Little Pieces,” or Binjamin Wilkomirski’s faux Holocaust-survivor memoir “Fragments,” or Margaret B. Jones’s mock gang history “Love and Consequences”—all books that could have been printed as fiction if their authors had had the courage to wade into the uncertain and largely unremunerative waters of that end of the publishing industry. Armstrong’s books had lower aims, and, for their author, they were essentially mercenary: a place for him to build a brand and tell his (partly false) side of a contentious story.