[Note: This essay was first published in Creative Nonfiction, then included in The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 1. It's reprinted here in slightly different form. It went through several revision passes and was to be included in How to Be Inappropriate, but we decided against it, since it wasn't, like, funny.]
How does one begin to defend James Frey, the infamous lying memoirist? By asking readers to imagine a future in which memoirists write and sign affidavits when they hand in their manuscripts? Who will check their facts? Will it be editorial assistants? Computer programs? Psychic profilers? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who shall Google the guards?
Still another question: Should we ask readers to ponder whether the James Frey Affair marks the end of a time when writers who wish to record how they perceive their own lives may do so, rather than stick to what is on public record? Judging by the media fallout and Oprah’s indignation, many would applaud such development. But there are other ways of looking at the Frey fallout. Thousands of psychotherapy patients await their treatment’s debunking; whole shelves of memoir, from Harriette Wilson to Primo Levi, wait for their warning stickers. The next Hunter S. Thompson, if there ever is one, should expect knocks on the door by the Authenticity Police, asking him if he really took that many tabs of acid that weekend in Vegas.
How does one begin to defend James Frey? I can’t. I can, however, try to tell you some stories, confess my own sins, and ask how others deal with theirs.
***
Here’s a story. On the afternoon of April 12, 2005, I spent an hour with James Frey at Nan A. Talese/Doubleday’s offices in the Saatchi & Saatchi Building on 375 Hudson Street.[1] That lower Manhattan building’s shiny postmodern curves show up in exterior shots on the sitcom Seinfeld to set up scenes at Elaine’s publishing office.
I was assigned to write a profile of the memoirist for Poets & Writers, a magazine that goes out to 60,000 aspiring creative writers nationwide. I had just read both of Frey’s books, 2003’s A Million Little Pieces and the soon-to-be-released sequel, 2005’s My Friend Leonard, in rapid succession. Along with review copies of those books, I held two tape recorders in my shoulder bag (one digital, one analog), pads of yellow legal paper, a box of black Uni-ball ultrafine pens, and a printout of my questions.
When I mention my Frey story to people, that I met him and all, many think it was after he was picked for Oprah Winfrey’s book club. People forget or don’t realize that A Million Little Pieces had a life of its own before then. His raw account of rehabilitation was, in fact, Amazon.com’s best-selling book of 2003 and a New York Times best seller, and had garnered a huge following. Frey got the one-two New York Times punch only big-time books get: a review in the Sunday New York Times Book Review and a “Books of the Times” article, in which Janet Maslin called attention to the fact that the book was sent around as fiction, then as a memoir.
Back then, however, I knew of Frey only from the now-infamous article by Joe Hagan for The New York Observer in February 2003, in which Frey talked shit about Dave Eggers’s 2000 memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. “[A] book that I thought was mediocre was being hailed as the best book written by the best writer of my generation,” he said. “Fuck that. And fuck him and fuck anybody that says that. I don’t give a fuck what they think of me. I’m going to try to write the best book of my generation and I’m going to try to be the best writer.”
In “Writing Personal Essays: On the Necessity of Turning Oneself into a Character,” Philip Lopate, perhaps our nation’s leading personal essayist, writes that to make an essay successful and interesting, “we need to dramatize ourselves” [italics his]; and, as part of that character-inventing process, we “maximize that pitiful set of quirks, those small differences that seem to set us apart from others, and project them theatrically, the way actors work with singularities in their physical appearances or voice textures.”
Frey certainly presented himself theatrically, both in his books and to the media. He seemed like a total badass. A famous image at that time was a black-and-white photo of Frey, with buzzed hair and shirtless, staring at the camera, crouched on a futon bed. One of his many tattoos is an inspirational acronym, FTBSITTTD (Fuck the bullshit it’s time to throw down).
***
Here’s a confession. I have never, ever wholly believed dialogue in a memoir. Especially in a coming-of-age memoir. It rarely reads as real to me.
Maybe it’s because it isn’t. When I was a teenager, I thought the opposite: that writers had these photographic memories for every word ever said. But since then, I have become well aware that the arbiters of creative nonfiction, essay, autobiography, memoir, and lyrical whatchamacallits have all convened somewhere and given “quoted dialogue” a free pass on the authenticity highway. But let’s speak plainly here: It is a lie. As we all know, in memoir, dialogue usually comprises representative snatches of what might have been said; it’s an emblematic device to remind us that This Important Discussion took place, refracted through the author’s subjective, often faulty memory. Set aside that bad writers crutch on dialogue in any genre; even the great memoir with dialogue rubs me the wrong way. In bad memoirs, I find myself skipping through these made-up composite conversations.
Part of the blame rests on my 12 years of Catholic catechism, where I was taught, among other things, that sins are subdivided into those of thought, word, or deed (cordis, oris, operis). Thought and word and deed are not only all the same thing, any combination of this unholy trinity not only reinforces, but compounds the sin. Comedian George Carlin sums the compounding of sin on his 1972 album Class Clown:
It was a sin to wanna feel up Ellen, it was a sin for you to plan to feel up Ellen, it was a sin for you to figure out a place to feel up Ellen, it was a sin to take her to the place to feel her up, and it was a sin to feel her up—it was six sins in one feel, man!
When I read dialogue in a memoir, then, I can’t help but have my Catholic thought-word-deed sin detector go off. The writer is vouching for these people’s words, and has gone and placed them inside quotation marks, that most authoritative punctuation of the journalist and researcher. Memoir dialogue, to me, is three sins in one: the writer not only lies about what is said, but provides the exact words for that lie, and then writes down whatever is accounted as gospel truth. How easy for the memoirist to enfold event and detail inside these conversations! And the memoirist who embellishes an event, is he or she more or less guilty of sin?
***
April 12, 2005, was a beautiful spring day, a perfect 61 degrees. I sat at the head of a long table and James Frey sat about four feet away. He was not a psycho badass motherfucker. He was a nice guy. He was calm and comfortable. He did not smile. He wore flip-flops and drank Diet Coke. His Tribeca loft, according to one of the publicists, was a couple blocks away. “Should we get you a limo for the ride home?” the publicist joked to him.
I slid both tape recorders toward him. There was no need: his voice was loud, much louder and more confident and easygoing than it would be in his television appearances months later on Larry King and Oprah Winfrey.
Me: I find it amazing when my novelist friends lash out at me and say, “You don’t know what it’s like, how much work is involved in this.” I know people who have been working on their novels for 6, 7 years, and I sometimes think, “Shit or get off the pot.”
James Frey: I hear those stories, too. I feel like I work with a lot of confidence. I never doubt myself at the beginning of the day that I’m not going to do what I set out to do. I never worry that I’m not going to get my work done. I don’t self-edit. I don’t read what I write. I start something and I just keep going forward. I don’t think I’m the best judge of my work, so I just keep going forward and let someone else take a look at it.
Me: That’s a gift. I mean, that’s a gift to have that kind of confidence as you write. I know so many people who don’t.
James Frey: Well, I think part of what holds people up is a fear of failure, or a fear of criticism. And neither of those things scare me at all. If I fail, I fail. I give it my best shot every day. I work really hard. And I think if anything, that’s my gift. It’s the ability to work really hard, very, very consistently. Now, I know a lot of people who are smarter than me or are probably more talented than me or more naturally gifted than me. But what I can do that they cannot do is go back every day for 8 to 10 hours a day and work. And it seems to be working for me.
Frey doesn’t curse in my interview with him. He doesn’t talk shit about other writers; he is gracious and complimentary, in fact. I try to bait him at one point and mention David Foster Wallace, how sometimes I “don’t get him.” It is the only time he cuts me off.
“Well, I read Wallace with a very specific idea,” he says. “I read all these people, and I started thinking about what they all had in common, what linked them, and what I could learn from that. The most obvious thing was that when their books came out, there was nothing like them that had preceded them. When you read Foster Wallace, you’d never seen anything like it.”
My editor later tells me that Frey refused to roll up his sleeves and show off his tattoos at the photo shoot. The profile ends up as the cover story—my first ever, and I’m fairly certain Frey’s as well—for Poets & Writers’ July/August 2005 issue. The title for the story, alongside the memoirist’s bearded face, is “The Transformation of James Frey.” My angle is that the bad boy writer had turned into a nice guy.
In my notes, I have him repeating something he’d said earlier, a writer-magazine platitude if there ever was one. “If there’s one thing to say to your readers at Poets & Writers,” he says, “the simplest and truest thing I can say is, ‘If I can do it, you can do it.’ There’s no Great Key you need to find.”
***
Under the klieg lights of Oprah’s book club, it didn’t take long for reporters to find out that hard-working and super-confident James Frey had lied, had over-dramatized himself. In January 2006, The Smoking Gun website published “A Million Little Lies: Exposing James Frey’s Fiction Addiction,” a 13,000-word exposé on the inconsistencies between Frey’s book and what is public record. “Frey appears to have fictionalized his past to propel and sweeten the book’s already melodramatic narrative and help convince readers of his malevolence,” the story read. The website also found that Frey had sought to expunge what record did exist of his criminal past to build “walls” around himself.
“So why would a man who spends 430 pages,” it continued—an inaccurate number, it should be noted, since it is a page count not found in any English edition of A Million Little Pieces—“chronicling every grimy and repulsive detail of his formerly debased life … need to wall off the details of a decade-old arrest?”
***
How do others deal with their own stories? On July 28, 2003, three months after A Million Little Pieces was published and two years before the James Frey Affair, writer Vivian Gornick found herself in an authenticity bind herself when, speaking at a writers conference at Goucher College, she mentioned that, in writing her critically acclaimed 1987 memoir Fierce Attachments, she had combined scenes and conversations and that, in a couple of pieces she wrote for the Village Voice between 1969 and 1977, she had used composite characters.
Let me back up. Gornick book, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative, is a standard text in many memoir and creative nonfiction classes, including this writer’s. In it, she emphasizes that what happened to writers of personal narrative “is not what matters”; rather, the greatness of the writing “is achieved when the reader is working hard to engage with the experience at hand.” “These writers might not ‘know’ themselves—that is, have more self-knowledge than the rest of us,” she continues, “but in each case—and this is crucial—they know who they are at the moment of writing.” Personal essay and memoir focus on different things to accomplish different goals; the essayist focuses on a particular situation, while the memoirist must “deliver wisdom.”[2]
Four days after the talk at Goucher College, Salon published student-journalist Terry Greene Sterling’s account of the events. The scene at the Gornick question-and-answer segment that followed, Sterling writes, was a “culture clash” with “a sophisticated New York memoirist facing off against a crowd that included highly regarded journalists.” (Sterling may be referring to herself here; one of the first Google search results for Sterling is a reprint of “Sterling Gets Top Award” [Phoenix New Times, April 22, 1999], which announces her as winner of Arizona’s Journalist of the Year, in part for her “exhaustive investigation” into the Baptist Foundation of Arizona. The story is penned by Sterling herself.)
The Gornick story gained even more traction when book critic and Georgetown University professor Maureen Corrigan offered her own response on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air. Corrigan was “disheartened” and “betrayed” by the “oddly off-hand admission” that Gornick “played fast and loose with the truth.”
“Any reader who falls in love with a work of nonfiction leaves him or herself open to being betrayed,” Corrigan said, in Cassandra fashion.
***
How do we deal with the sinner? That the ruckus and fallout over the lies in James Frey’s memoir A Million Little Pieces started only after its selection for Oprah’s Book Club can’t only speak to the popularity of a talk show. It says something about the insularity of literary culture, if such a thing even exists. But there has to be more.
Maybe it says something about how pre-Oprah readers suspended their disbelief, as I do reading in-quotes dialogue. Or they were more sophisticated than post-Oprah readers, who not only sought wisdom from the book, but looked to it for a pragmatic, utilitarian, self-help function. Or maybe it speaks to how every writer does what Frey did, though he had the misfortune of choosing to embellish verifiable facts, rather than inner states of being, the torn-down buildings of past lives, dead people’s accounts of events. Or maybe it’s simply that this kind of literary success always breeds a smackdown.
Or is it the unseemliness of a writer entering the public realm and being on television at all? “The writer on a TV talk show,” Richard R. Lingeman wrote in his essay “Writers as Show-Biz” in the New York Times Book Review in 1971, “is a little like a minister touting his next sermon at a kootch show, while being frequently interrupted by the barker’s spiel.”
***
Here’s another story. I am a tragically hip, middle-aged professor with a dusty record collection. I am reading the June 2006 issue of the English music magazine Mojo and its cover story on Joe Strummer, the rhythm guitarist, singer, and main songwriter for The Clash. In Pat Gilbert’s story “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” I learn for the first time that Strummer, far from being the man-of-the-people who sang such manifesto-anthems as “London Calling,” “White Riot” and “I’m So Bored With the U.S.A.,” was actually the son of a junior-level English foreign diplomat and had lived in Turkey, Egypt, Germany, and Mexico before he was sent off to boarding school at nine years old. At 18, he went to Buckingham Palace to see his dad presented with the Members of the British Empire award for service to Queen and country. Yet the former John Graham Mellor rarely addressed his middle-class background when he played in The Clash. Instead, he helped other Clash camp members “act working class” and talked to reporters about “slitting people with flick-knives.”
It would be fair to say that Strummer lied, to a certain degree, all his life. Had I found out about Strummer’s middle-class past when I was a 14-year-old, I would have stopped listening to The Clash and denounced them, no questions asked. Actually, I had questions about the Clash’s precious streed cred, even back then: at the 1983 Us Festival, where the Clash had headlined the night before, Van Halen lead singer David Lee Roth made a remark onstage, after swigging from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s provided to him onstage by a tuxedoed midget.
“I just want to take this time to say that this is real whiskey here,” he says. “The only people who put iced tea in Jack Daniel’s bottles is The Clash, baby.”
My reaction now? I wouldn’t sweat Strummer’s punk status and I’ll still listen to London Calling, but for me the question remains: Why did Strummer/Mellor do this? Why didn’t he present himself as a middle-class kid sympathetic to working-class causes, rather than present himself as a character who has dramatized himself?
Maybe those post-Oprah readers and critics of Frey are the equivalent of 14-year-old punk rockers who denounce their heroes when they find out they don’t get their clothes from the gutter. Frey’s book, with its tale of overcoming addiction that inspired so many of Oprah’s viewers, was especially ripe for this kind of backlash.
***
Frey’s confession, “A Note to the Reader,” was posted on Riverhead’s website in January 2006. Frey lied and exaggerated, he explains, because he “wanted the stories in the book to ebb and flow, to have dramatic arcs, to have the tension that all great stories require.” He also changed details, he says, to protect other people’s anonymity. He had outlined a couple of these on his second visit to Oprah; for instance, Frey admitted that Lilly, the name of his girlfriend in the book, had killed herself not by hanging, but by “cutting her wrists.”
He writes that he spent three months in jail. That, too, was a lie; it was more like “several hours.” There are other “embellishments” in the book as well. “I made other alterations in my portrayal of myself, most of which portrayed me in ways that made me tougher and more daring and more aggressive than in reality I was, or I am,” he writes. When I read this, I think back to Frey’s dented-in boxer’s nose as I talked to him. It clearly had been broken, and every time he spoke, there was a clear whistle from his septum. People’s “skewed perception of themselves,” he writes, helps them “overcome” problems, “do things they thought they couldn’t do anymore.”
“My mistake,” he writes, “and it is one I deeply regret, is writing about the person I created in my mind to help me cope, and not the person who went through the experience.”
***
Gornick didn’t offer up a confession. She didn’t feel the need to. In her response to Corrigan on August 11, 2003, she sounded angry, like my sister scolding one of her sons in stern staccato. She called Fresh Air from the Yaddo artist colony and said:
A memoir is a story taken directly from the raw material of a writer’s own life and shaped into a piece of experience that can hold meaning for the disinterested reader. What actually happened is only material; what the writer makes of what happened is everything. To state the case briefly: memoirs belong to the category of literature, not of journalism. It is a misunderstanding to read a memoir as though the writer owes the reader the same record of factual accuracy that is owed in newspaper reporting or literary journalism. What is owed [by the memoirist] is only the ability to persuade that the narrator is honestly trying to get down to the bottom of the experience at hand.
Just as Oprah gets the last word with Frey, so is Corrigan given the chance to comment yet again. In her first commentary piece, Corrigan had spoken of an “autobiographer’s pledge” that each writer implicitly recites when taking an “accounting” of one’s life, as well as an “autobiographer’s contract.” To those of the more academic persuasion, these terms “pledge” and “contract” might recall French literary theorist Philippe Lejeune’s 1973 essay “The Autobiographical Pact” (“Le pacte autobiographique”). Unlike Corrigan, Lejeune does not map out a doomed, litigious writer-reader relationship, nor does he assert the lack of any relationship at all, as Roland Barthes does in his 1977 essay “The Death of the Author.” Instead, Lejeune describes a middle path where the author connects the “world-beyond-text and the text.”
“An author is not a person,” he writes. He is “defined as simultaneously a socially responsible real person and the producer of a discourse. For the reader, who does not know the real person, all the while believing in his existence, the author is defined as the person capable of producing this discourse, and so he imagines what he is like from what he produced.” Paul John Eakin, a scholar in life-writing studies and Indiana University professor, writes that “Lejeune’s position resides in his willingness to concede the fictive status of the self and then to proceed with its functioning as experiential fact.”
But what’s perhaps the most maddening to me about Corrigan’s second commentary, her response-to-Gornick’s-response, is the interchanging of the words “memoir” and “autobiography”; in her 359-word commentary, forms of the word “autobiography” are used nine times, “memoir” four times. The difference between memoir and autobiography, to many writers, is a crucial one. Gore Vidal goes to great pains to point out the difference in the introduction to his memoir, Palimpsest. A memoir, he writes, “is how one remembers one’s own life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts double-checked.” “[I]n a memoir,” Vidal continues, “there are many rubbings-out and puttings-in.”
***
How should we deal with such sins and sinners? I don’t think it’s an accident that, while Frey embellished his stories consciously to punch up his story, many of his fellow memoirists who gathered in the town square to cast stones were by and large ones who, whether they want to admit it or not, embellish their own work unconsciously, punch up their own unverifiable, emotional truths, for which there are no notes, no Smoking Guns, nothing but a conscience to fact-check them.
Take, for instance, memoirist Mary Karr’s New York Times op-ed piece, “His So-Called Life,” in which she calls Frey a “skunk” who broke the “cardinal rule” of memoirs, that you don’t “make stuff up.” The key phrase Karr, whose classic 1995 memoir The Liar’s Club recalls chunks of her childhood with remarkable detail, uses to explain why she doesn’t “make stuff up”—she tells how she declined her publisher’s request to make up a happy ending to her memoir—is “God is in the truth.” Had she found out Helen Keller was “merely nearsighted, not deaf, blind and mute,” she writes, her “bubble might have popped.”
Perhaps a more apt comparison of Frey with Keller, however, would be if Frey were merely a problem drinker, not a drug addict. Or if in The Story of My Life Keller embellished the set of circumstances that led to her condition and situation, as Frey did with a made-up criminal past that led to his stint in rehab.
Oh wait, Keller did lie. Keller, you may recall, became deaf and blind at 19 months, an age of which, all neurologists and psychologists agree, humans retain few if any memories. Here’s what Keller claims to remember:
I fancy I still have confused recollections of that illness. I especially remember the tenderness with which my mother tried to soothe me in my waking hours of fret and pain, and the agony and bewilderment with which I awoke after a tossing half sleep, and turned my eyes, so dry and hot, to the wall, away from the once-loved light, which came to me dim and yet more dim each day…
“[D]uring the first nineteenth months of my life,” she continues, “I had caught glimpses of broad, green fields, a luminous sky, trees and flowers which the darkness that followed could not wholly blot out.”
Picking on Helen Keller isn’t exactly playing fair, I know. I suppose what I am asking is if we should allow the existence of more than one kind of memoirist. On one end of the spectrum, there are memoirists who invoke Romantic-era words such as “fancy” and invocations of God’s will to get to the Truth. They take pledges and sign contracts. On the other end are memoirists for whom the truth is their own to name. These are the ones who do not profess an allegiance to “fancy” or invoke a fictive God. They value emotional truth over public record. They don’t take oaths or sign contracts. On the one end we have faith, on the other end, will.
What I mean by “will” is perhaps what enrages people most about James Frey; that is, here is an author who willfully changes the details in his life to serve the story—an unacknowledged sin for countless other memoirists. A cobbled-together childhood conversation as a major plot point registers as less of a sin on the Authenticity Meter, and diminishes less the memoirists’ capacity as truth-teller than a tall tale of a criminal past.
***
“Do these members of the Goucher College audience imagine that memoirists walk around wired for conversation capture like snitching mobsters?” Tom Bissell writes about Sterling’s Salon Gornick account. “Do they believe that everything in nonfiction has to be exactly documented to be emotionally true? Do they not understand the huge difference between literary memoir and a newspaper article entitled ‘Property Sale Raises Questions Amid Ethics Inquiry’?”
Take for Exhibit A Kenneth Goldsmith’s Soliloquy, a 400-page book in which the author—a poet, visual artist, and freeform radio station DJ—transcribes everything he says in a week in 1996. Nothing is edited. Here’s an excerpt of a still longer excerpt that appears in the online journal Readme:
It was Rick, Aki, Mike, there was this guy also that you probably never heard of named Nick Arbatsky. Sure you never heard of Nick. He dropped out he did a Alaskan oil spill project his big claim to fame he had this big fund-raiser so when the Titanic crashed out there in the waters the oil spilled all over the Valdez he went up there with canvases, right? Everybody chipped in he had a big party. He went up there with canvases to try to make like oil Valdez soaked. And he came back, man, and this. That was a good idea. And then he had a coming back party so he could show what he got. And the guy comes back with like, we figured he would have like these dripping, rich canvases, you know, like birds plastered. They were like these canvases he kind of drew on a little bit and and and. No no there was no tar. It was the most like like Helen Frankenthaler washes and it was his impressions in it and that was it for Nick, man, that was the last you ever heard of Nick. Nick was like like like pegged to be the next huge thing in those days too because of that project. And and the Village Voice might have written something about him. So, have you read the Voice since it’s free? I I hate the Voice. When did we stop reading the Voice what year? Yeah. Everybody once, yeah yeah. Well we picked it up because it was free and it’s the same thing. It’s like a cliché. Oh my god, yeah. Much better. We like Time Out. Yeah, the ad is good.
You get the idea. Just as Bissell proposes, Goldsmith wore a wire. A hidden, voice-activated microphone, actually; one that, Goldsmith writes to me over e-mail, tripped on and off “from the moment I woke up on Monday morning till the moment I went to sleep Sunday night.” He employed a high school kid to transcribe his tapes, and a true-to-life memoir was born.
***
Before he wrote his story and after he left rehab, James Frey was an aspiring screenwriter. He wanted to write something that “someone would pay me money for.” His first two screenplays, he tells me, “were just awful.” The third, a “very commercial romantic comedy,” was readable. He sold it.
That very commercial romantic comedy was 1998’s Kissing a Fool, a box office and critical flop Frey co-wrote with director Doug Ellin. In an opening scene, aspiring writer Jay Murphy, played by Jason Lee (Clerks, My Name Is Earl), has set up his best friend, the womanizing sportscaster Max Abbitt, played by David Schwimmer (Friends), on a blind date with his editor, Samantha “Sam” Andrews, played by Israeli actress Mili Avital. (Jay is working on a novel, by the way; a roman à clef based on his own life.)
Max bangs on Jay’s door at 6:30 the next morning to complain about Sam’s behavior at a fancy restaurant, where, Max says, she “drank like a fish” and “acted like a psychotic.” Minutes later, Sam knocks on Jay’s door. Jay hides Max in the closet. Sam complains about how Max took her to the Crazy Horse, a gentleman’s club, for drinks, and came onto her in his convertible Mercedes. Max rushes out of the closet and argues with Sam. Jay can’t decide which conflicting account to believe. He leans toward Sam’s story. Max is shocked his best friend would do this.
“I’m not taking sides,” Jay says. “It’s just that her story sounds a little more like you than your story sounds like her.”
The whole thing, it turns out, is a ruse. Sam and Max had a great time on their date and spent the whole night together. They decided to wake up their friend and play a joke on him.
“Wow,” Jay says, taken aback. “You guys really over-plotted this thing, didn’t you?”
***
So how will we define memoir now? Is the state of the genre any better or worse after the James Frey Affair? As I write this, I have my notes from my interview with Frey and a big stack of philosophy books on my desk. I thought I’d consult the Great Thinkers to help me define words like Truth and Memoir and Autobiography and Lying. I’ve got the Pablo Picasso quote ready: “We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.”
Then I thought about dragging out that hoary device of using the dictionary to look up all those words, their histories. I thought better and went back to philosophy. “When we are disputing about the proper meaning to be attached to a particular word in a sentence, etymology is of little use,” the great literary critic Owen Barfield writes in his essay “The Development of Meaning.” “Only children run to the dictionary to settle an argument.”
***
How does one begin to defend James Frey? I haven’t even started. I haven’t mentioned how Oprah made this more about herself and her own addiction to veracity. I haven’t even started on the publishing industry’s role, its genre relativism, its obsession with marketing authenticity. I want to point out that no quotation marks appear in either A Million Little Pieces or My Friend Leonard, that there’s no attempt at made-up dialogue, re-creations of what was or was not said. Jerry Stahl, author of another extreme addiction memoir, Permanent Midnight, writes that Frey “stepped over standards and precedent as an impediment to Getting The Job Done. The job, in this case, being the creation of a history compatible with one’s own myth.” Whether Stahl means it or not, I agree with him.
In the Poetics, Aristotle talks about the two sources of poetry. One is our instinct for imitation, to reproduce reality, our pleasure in the artist’s attempt. The other is our instinct for harmony and rhythm, our “rude improvisations.” I don’t think I can defend what Frey lied about as such as much as his right to imitate and harmonize, these “rude improvisations.” Single-source news stories will still run on the front page and be accepted as fact. Future writers’ parents will wear wires. Everything will be transcribed into a public record; nothing will be edited or crafted, and no one will be dramatized into a character; no one will be disheartened or betrayed as the drudgery of documentation continues. It might be a step forward. But writers will always have the desire to imitate and transform, not simply record, real life.
[1] It should be pointed out that “offices” in question are not the main offices for Talese’s operation; several Readers of this piece in its previous incarnations have written to point out this fact, each one in the rather self-satisfied way writers who know things do. The meetingplace in question, however, remains part of the Doubleday operation, which in turn counts as one of Talese’s offices. So there.
[2] Harvard University book critic Augusta Rohrback sums up Gornick’s points better than I can. “At first glance, the difference between the two forms might seem to be expressed in terms of the stakes,” Rohrbach writes. “The essay, as a form, turns on a limit that the memoir must, by definition, surpass. While the essayist need only illuminate a given subject, a memoirist must expound on life itself.”
