Memoir or Fiction?

And as far as his sales go, wemi has already announced she’s going to buy the book (she borrowed it previously) just to strike a blow at Frey’s critics and demonstrate her support for him. If this is any indication – and I bet it is – Frey will do even better after this.

I just received an impassioned phone from wemi, who loves this book and is therefore quite adamant in her defence of it. She asked me to get her point across, which is rather difficult for me, since I’m not sure we’re in complete agreement. But I will try anyway.

She asked me to bring up Frey’s comments about perception and memory. Frey pointed out that we all experience life in different ways. We perceive things differently and so when we recount our past experiences, they are not always what really happened, or how others remember them.

This is true, but it makes a poor defence. It is sophistry (“A plausible but misleading or fallacious argument”). If I were to meet a woman while drunk in a bar and then have a great conversation with her, I might be justified in saying, later on, that we were flirting, or that she thought I was hot, or that she wanted to sleep with me. If that was my perception, I can say that honestly, even if in reality she was telling her friends that some creep was bothering her and she couldn’t get rid of him. However, if I say we went and made out in the bathroom – and we didn’t – then I’m lying.

In other words, perceiving things a certain way, or forgetting things, may cause us to make mistakes – but stating that entire events happened that did not happen is either lying, fiction or delusion.

But as I tried to make clear in my original post, I am not particularly upset with Frey. Frey does not try to use the “different perception” defence to account for major discrepancies in his book. Frey has himself admitted that he made up parts of the book. He stands by the “essential truth” of the book, but not by the details.

This is similar to Oprah’s position. She gave her support carefully: “the underlying message of redemption in James Frey’s memoir still resonates with me”. She’s not saying that the book is literally true, but rather, that the “underlying message” is true. Not even Oprah, Frey’s biggest supporter, is willing to say that she thinks the book is entirely truthful.

This brings me to Ryan’s comment:

When you say an event happened with the intention of being taken seriously, but the event didn’t actually happen, that’s called “lying”.

Did Frey lie when he wrote A Million Little Pieces?

I don’t think so, because I don’t think he intended to be taken seriously – that is, I don’t think he intended that his book be a literal, factual account. Frey says he shopped the book around as a novel, so clearly he felt that it was fictional enough to qualify as, well, fiction. He has admitted to changing things, embellishing things, and making things up. When he wrote the book, he was writing fiction – based on his life, or as the movies put it, “based on a true story” – but fiction nonetheless.

The deceptive part was publishing the book as a memoir, a decision that his publisher bears as much responsibility for as Frey, unless they too were ignorant that it was not entirely true. Basing my opinion completely on the words that came out of Frey’s mouth in the interview last night, this book is a novel, not a memoir.

Criticize the human mind’s obsession with classification all you want, but memoir is a non-fiction genre. Non-fiction means truthful. Not perfect, of course, since perception does change things, and memory fails, but not based on imagination.

Again, although I think publishing this as a memoir was deceptive, to me, it’s forgivable. It’s still a good book. Not to compare apples with oranges, but the Bible was once taken to be literally true. Many Christians no longer believe this to be the case, but they still think it is Truth. The packaging has changed – the literal word of Frey and the literal word of God have given way to a more flexible interpretation – but the message remains the same. Some recovering addicts, however, are not so forgiving.

Frey said last night that he is a “flawed human being” who “continues to make mistakes”. Although he said he’d still publish this book as an undisclaimed memoir, I think he recognizes that doing so was a mistake. The sequel to his book, My Friend Leonard, is being published with a disclaimer. Given that the narratives are connected, that should tell you something.

An amusing paragraph from an article on the controversy reminded me of my own domestic situation if I keep shooting off my mouth:

Nan Talese, who acquired A Million Little Pieces for Doubleday, says that memoir falls somewhere between fact and fiction because it’s based on memory, which is naturally unreliable. On the current list, Frey’s book is included in nonfiction, which is simply the wrong category, she believes. Gay Talese, her husband and a renowned writer in his own right, argues that there is no middle ground: A book is either nonfiction or fiction, and nonfiction writers don’t take liberties. (Imagine dinner at their house this week.)

;)

After thinking about it, I suppose what upsets me about this whole thing is that I feel like I created a relationship with James Frey as a reader of his book. It is such a personal memoir of his gut wrenching journey thorough rehab. I felt sorry for him during the story, I cried for him, I almost felt his pain at times due to the form of writing he used. I guess I created my own relationship with him as I read. I suppose after hearing about all this I just feel a bit betrayed by someone who I made a connection with through his writing. I trusted his story and I believed him. Just like I would a friend. I suppose I just feel a bit ‘had’ by him. His story invited me to get close to him. It’s like a friend telling me a very personal story and then calling me the next day to tell me that they made up pieces of their story. I’d be pissed. I’m glad I bought the book becuase it was such a great read, but if I had known prior the purchasing the book that parts of it were fabricated – I may not have been so riveted by his story and saw him as a bit of a hero in the end.
I have a feeling that I’ll start the second book but becuase I feel that he may not be telling me the truth…I’ll end of not finnishing the book.

I always seem to respond to Ryan right when nicoleb is writing her comments, and then when my comment is posted right after hers it looks like I have ignored what she had to say completely in favour of a previous poster.

Anyway nicoleb, that is by far the biggest problem with all of this. It’s one thing in your case because you are a stable non-drug-addicted individual, but for people who are struggling with addiction that were inspired by this story – some of whom went so far as to tattoo Frey’s tag line “hold on” to their bodies – this must be hard to take.

Mark Twain wrote: Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.

Nowadays, everything has to be labelled true – think of the rash of films that claim to be true stories, or the recent Liberal campaign ads that proclaim “we did not make this up.” However, I think that reality tv was & is the “first in a freightening stream of signals” that we may be over-extending the value of the label “true.”

Despite the fact that Survivor (the tv show) may very well be a scripted act, I can make the following observation: reality tv claims to show us how humans behave, and further, it claims to be true.

Scenario one (the insidious scenario) – Survivor is pure fiction. Scripts, actors, editing. The show still presents itself as truth.

Scenario two – Survivor is unscripted, featuring average slobs reacting genuinley under duress. However, the show is still a subjective interpretation of the moments that transpired. That is to say, the editors trim the show’s content to create the most compelling narrative; they also highlight the most controversial moments.

In either of the above scenarios, Survivor is a biased 40 minute case study of human behavior. It emphasizes the worst of human character flaws and it attempts to normalize these flaws through repetition. It also attempts to normalize social stigmas (i.e that gay people are effeminate and wierd; that veterans are racist; that American people are patently competitive… or that they are survivors)

So what does this have to do with the novel in question? Well, I think we should examine this book in context. If the cultural milieu of our times is perfectly willing to blend fact with fiction, we should be discussing this novel as a part of that movement. Further, I think we need to ask ourselves some questions. Has our generation outstepped any previous in terms of embellishing truth? Is there likely to a be a backlash (artistic, philisophical, or otherwise) to the ‘reality’ cannon of tv, books, films and the like.

Ryan claims that “the habits of thought that enable people to make sense of the universe” are at risk. These are the same habits of thought that enable people ot make sense of one another. I read somewhere that trust is the most difficult quality of a relationship to define. We know when it is present and we know when it is absent. In many ways, it is intuitive. I would be scared to think that we are dulling our intuition of trust. Are we?

The act of telling History, the memoir included, should never be interpreted as the pursuit of absolute truth. And we should be equally suspect of the grey areas of human communication: the less formal and less enduring ways in which we create a collective social memory and self-awareness.

I’m somewhat torn on the issue of this book. Having not read it, I am also at a disadvantage to make comments on it’s content. I will say this.

I’m not convinced that reality tv or self-described disengenuine memoirs are a worthwhile or enduring way of looking at the world around us. However, I am also not convinced that cultural artifacts, like the memoirs we read or the tv shows we watch, have ever been faithful to truth, and I think we still have a sound enough intuition of trust to know that.

Here’s Frey on Oprah, apologizing for blowing smoke up everyone’s ass to sell books: “When I was writing the book, instead of being as introspective as I should have been, I clung to [the tough guy] image.” He did this, he says, as a “coping mechanism”.

But don’t worry; everything’s okay now. He “made a mistake” and feels real bad about it. Acting like a grade A asshole, as you know, is easily rectified these days once you’re caught in the act by admitting you “made a mistake”.

On the same episode, Oprah apologized for defending the “essential truth” Frey’s book when she called into the Larry King Show on January 11. Oprah also “made a mistake” by suggesting “the truth does not matter.”

The fact is, anyone can get away with anything, as long as they do the perp walk for the court of public opinion and admit their “mistake” – as if lying and cheating are equivalent to using the wrong fork at a dinner party.

A year ago, Armstrong Williams used similar language after it was revealed that he accepted $241,000 (USD) from the US Department of Education in exchange for saying nice things about the No (Rich) Child Left Behind Act on his show and in his articles. His “judgment was not the best”, but not to worry: once he was busted in the pages of USA Today, he “learned from” the mistake.

President Bush then said the Department of Ed “made a mistake” when they paid the journalist under the table to ensure favourable coverage.

You know people: they make mistakes.

Even the missing WMD in Iraq was a “mistake”. David Kay, the head of the US weapons inspection team that scoured the country after the invasion, announced, “we were almost all wrong” about Iraq’s WMD, “and I certainly include myself here.” (Well, a few of us weren’t wrong, but that’s beside the point.) Kay even had words of advice for President Bush: “He should say we were mistaken” about the prewar intelligence.

Italy is also getting into the mistake game. An Italian minister named Rocco Buttiglione admitted in 2004 that his government’s support for the Iraq war “may have been a mistake”. Not was, mind you, but may have been. Now that’s equivocating.

Mistakes are everywhere. Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. admitted it was “a mistake on my part” not to give much attention to people who questioned the US government’s drive to war.

Even a majority of Americans, according to recent polls, believe the Iraq war was a “mistake”. Gosh, we shore are sorry ’bout that business over in Eye-raq.

But again, not to worry. Just admit it was a mistake and, you know, move on.

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