Liars and memoirs
The transcendent Cecily commented, “I’d be interested in hearing what you have to say about the James Frey and J.T. Leroy scandals…”
I knew someone was going to call me on that ‘cuz I just wrote about how memoirs aren’t always 100% truthful!
First off, I haven’t read the books in question. Remember I generally only get my books in thrift stores and they aren’t showing up there yet. (This is why I didn’t read any Anita Shreve ’til about two years ago.) I figure in two years the shelves will be flush with discarded copies and maybe I’ll grab one then.
It looks to me that J. T. Leroy is sort of a grown-up Lemony Snicket — call it performance art. The whole fabrication (if it is one) is so outrageous that the “is it true or not?” is part of the story. It’s part of the marketing and the mystique. Also the books are marketed as fiction — maybe fictionalized autobiography but still, fiction. This isn’t true of Frey.
In my mind, lies are permittable in memoir if they are truthful. In other words, if a conversation that didn’t happen is created to illuminate a larger truth as in Vivian Gornick’s walks with her mother. (However I do think — and I didn’t know this when I wrote the first entry — that Gornick should have been explicit at some point, perhaps in a note to her readers in the front of the book.) Any dialogue in a memoir is going to be a fabrication and likely scene changes, composite characters, etc. But the spirit of truth should underlie these efforts, which I believe was true of Gornick’s memoir although, as I said, I don’t think this is permittable in a journalistic effort.
Frey’s lies weren’t performance art and they didn’t underline the truth of his story. It looks to me (again, not having read the books) that he tried to sell the book as a novel and when it didn’t take, he switched to memoir. I wonder if at any point his heart started to sink when he realized he’d hit a home run of a bestseller. Maybe he didn’t think anyone would read his book and he could keep getting away with it.
One could argue that his book is entirely metaphor. That he felt like a “Criminal” (and I’ll add here that just reading excerpts makes me HATE his overuse of capitals) except that he never says, “I felt like” he says, “I was.” Also he trampled on other people’s lives for the book — most notably the lives of the families who lost their daughters to the train wreck. That’s inexcusable. Using the event for inspiration for a novel? Writers do that. Lifting it to add a gloss to his “Criminal” image? Indefensible.
What kills me is that you know 14 million people are going to go buy the friggin’ book now. Listen, you want to read it? Wait two years and pick up a copy in a thrift store. Trust me. The shelves will be over-flowing.
You know everyone at work was raving about Frey’s book a couple of weeks ago. I should see how they all feel now. I saw him on Larry King (flipping channels) so that is really my only knowledge.
When I heard about the book, no matter how brilliantly written or told it was, I decided not to read it. I have way too much up close and personal knowledge of alcoholism to ever be entertained or fascinated or inspired by it.Frankly those details, fabricated or not, are the kind of thing that send me into a huge deperession. To me there are not good “I was so drunk” stories. Most people I talked to in Al-anon said the same thing.
I haven’t heard an alcoholic’s take on it though.
I probably wouldn’t pay the 49 cents the Salvation Army charges for the books of either of those authors…
That said, I believe I read that the publisher said that, even if what Frey wrote wasn’t true, that was still okay because it’s a “memoir”, and thus subjective. Um, okay.
Haven’t read the book, and don’t plan to. I dislike liars. I saw Frey on Larry King Live jabbering about the “emotional truth” of his work (with Oprah calling in and agreeing with him) and sat shaking my head. Elaborate fabrications are called “emotionlly truthful” these days? How CAN you be truthful about the emotions of a life you’ve never lived? Mind-boggling, that. But I agree the whole controversy will boost sales beautifully and everybody will be happy, except for a few curmudgeons like us.
I’m not too pleased about the JT Leroy scam either … while his/her books were apparently marketed as fiction (good) he/she still conned a lot of people into a “relationship” with him/her based on his sob-story background.
I put Frey’s book on hold at the library in October, and got it on Tuesday. I read sixty pages and said, “I can’t TAKE this anymore.” The formatting was driving me insane.
It’s all left-justified–no paragraph indents, no line breaks between paragraphs, so it all runs together. There are no quotation marks, no way to tell who is talking or when it goes from talking to thought or description, and while you can tell this by context usually, it requires more effort than your standard book. And you already mentioned the overuse of capital letters. I have a hard enough time focusing these days without stuff like that making the book harder to read. I decided it wasn’t worth it.
Yeah, the excerpts of Frey’s book confirmed my decision not to read it in the first place. On top of which, I took lots of memoir workshops in grad school, and the consensus was that you just can’t make stuff up because you wish it happened. Reconstructing a dimly remembered but evocative day in your childhood? Sure. But sending yourself to jail when you never went at all? No way.
I haven’t read the book and don’t really care to.
But I just wanted to point out that the library is also an option.
I never buy books I haven’t read these days. I only buy books that I’ve read and loved enough that I want them on my shelf to read over and over and over.
Your commentors (and you, of course) are dead on. Out and out lieing is bad, no matter what you consider to be “a personal truth.”
And transcendent? *blushing*
I’m working on a ‘memoir’ right now (well, it’s sort of a memoir, about just one part of my life…), and yes, obviously the dialogue isn’t verbatim and so on and so forth. Heck, I’m writing it under a pseudonym, and I’ve changed the names of everyone involved. But still, every thing in it is as true as recollection can make it. If I say, “and then we asked for a restraining order,” it means we asked for a restraining order. That should be the case with all memoirs. I assume that if someone describes every detail of a room from 50 years previous, some of it might be elaborated upon, and the conversation probably didn’t go EXACTLY that way. But if they said they were arrested? I expect that they were, you know, ARRESTED.
I find this kind of thing so offensive…most of all because it only gets rewarded. If everyone in America didn’t know James Frey’s name before this past week or so, they sure as shooting do now…
P.S.: I just read the piece on Frey on TheSmokingGun:
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/jamesfrey/0104061jamesfrey1.html
What shocks me most is the way he appropriated the tragic death of two high school seniors for his own narrative purposes …. disgusting, given the fact he had nothing to do with any of it. He simply leeched off the story. Unfathomable.
I bought it, read most of it and hated it and how I am pissed about paying for it. I am returning it to B&N tomorrow. But, I will say that it reads dishonestly. It doesn’t *feel* true. At least that confirms that emotion.
Best!
Well, I read it. And liked it. But I sort of felt while I was reading it that some things weren’t the truth. I don’t think I would of liked the book more or less if it was written as fiction. But lying isn’t good..I especially don’t like when people continue to lie when confronted. So if he really lied, he should just fess up.