A few months ago, I was talking with my summer advisor about the problem of truth in nonfiction, and she told me that it’s usually obvious when writing students make stuff up. It’s never as interesting, she said.
I thought about that today when I read that the Smoking Gun has accused James Frey of greatly exaggerating (some would call it lying) about some of the more vivid details in A Million Little Pieces. It’s a book Sandy thought was awful, and I thought at best mediocre, and perhaps now we know why.
Some writers can lie and get away with it, but most of us end up betraying our writing voices when we prevaricate. Our writing voice gets that oily, shifty feeling that comes when we’ve fibbed to a family member–I didn’t eat that last cupcake!–or tried to reuse a postage stamp. (Though with that, I may simply be betraying my Camp Fire Girl background–not that I’m ashamed of it.)
It’s too bad Frey didn’t just tell it as it was, within the reasonable parameters of artistic recreation. I don’t care if his shirt was red or green, or if he buffs off the edges of someone’s sentences; I do care if a quick overnighter in jail gets spun into a three-month stay, or if he inserts himself into a train accident he wasn’t involved in so “he can falsely portray himself as the tragedy’s third victim.” That’s fiction–and not very good fiction.
I can see a good memoir beginning with a few hours spent in the pokey. There are plenty of us who would be scared enough to find ourselves in jail, or even threatened with the smallest legal reprimand. For some time I’ve wanted to find a place for a vignette from my days stationed in Germany, when I had one more drink than one should have when driving, slid into a snowbank, was helped out by a policeman (who if he noticed anything said nothing), and, properly terrified, never mixed drinking and driving again. For that matter, Proust ate a cookie and wrote about it; E.B. White gave an enema to a pig; Nabokov devoted pages to a small boy hiding under a couch. What good writing has is voice. What good nonfiction writing has is voice, and a commitment to the truth.
Posted on this day, other years:
- A scholar's pool of tears, Part 2: The pre in preprint means not done yet - 2017
- My Action-Packed ALA Midwinter 2009 Schedule - 2009
- Trends! Trends! Trends! - 2007
- Top Technology Trends Solicited - 2005
- Midwinter Report - 2004
I just posted a note about this on our library blog. We are going to link to the post from the catalog record for the book. This could be valuable in teaching critical thinking.
I posted about it too (didn’t everyone in our small universe??). I have a friend who wrote a memoir about events in which I participated, and she left me out of the book. Yikes, I said, how could you leave me out, I was THERE. OK, she said, I’ll put you back in; and she chose an aspect which furthered her shaped reality. I’ve looked at nonfiction differently ever since. Of COURSE it’s shaped–but still, not made up.
Which universe, Miriam–writers or librarians?
“Shaped” versus “made-up” can be a very fine line; does every character in the room need to be present? Or maybe the question is, what happens to the truth of the tale if a character is removed? It sounds as if your colleague shaped the story to the point where significant facts or outcomes were distorted. Though any family story could have many Rashamon angles!
I think an account in which every detail is told would be unreadable. Once or twice I’ve kept a list of reference questions as they come up at the desk, to see the shape of things. As soon as I get hung up on writing down every last internet signup and where’s- the-Plaza-from-here, I lose track of what I’m really trying to see.
Lots of people were there, in reality, in the events described in my friend’s memoir; and only a selection of them appear in scenes in the book. If I didn’t loom as large on somebody else’s stage as I might have imagined, well, where’s the surprise in that?