Better Late Than Never (Adam weighs in on 2006’s biggest literary controversy)
May 7th, 2007 by Adam
I finally read A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, the ex-addict who wrote a memoir about his struggle with drugs and alcohol and time spent in rehab. It was very good if a little overly dramatic and predictable– but I’m sick as hell of people badmouthing him for fictionalizing his account and calling him a fraud. That’s some bullshit.
Gore Vidal said it best in his own memoir Palimpsest, “a memoir is how one remembers one’s own life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts double-checked.” So what if James Frey remembers his past differently—a decade spent stumbling around in a drug and alcohol induced haze is guaranteed to fuzz your memory. So what if, in the interests of brevity or good-storytelling or protecting an identity, he changes details, embellishes his arrest record, or alters the fate of his love interest? That was a fucked up love story between two very broken people and he actually pulled it off by making you believe in it. What the fuck difference does it make if she committed suicide by hanging in the book and slitting her wrists in real life?
It is pretty shoddy that he shopped the book around as fiction originally, was rejected 20-something times, resubmitted it as a memoir and it was snatched up. But I see that as less a poor reflection on his character (who doesn’t want to sell a book that they lived 90% of and spent years writing?) and more a statement on our voyeuristic tendencies as a culture— that a gripping story isn’t as gripping unless we know for a fact that it actually happened to someone. That’s sad, and indicative of another aspect of our culture: we’ve lost our ability to universally empathize. We can coo and say ‘poor, brave man’ to James Frey if we imagine him in the narrative driver’s seat, but for the book to be about no one in particular doesn’t pique our interest the same way. We, as a culture, tend to believe that fictional truth can never be as real, and certainly not more so, than “real” truth. If you believe this, read The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, in particular the section called “How To Tell A True War Story”. Maybe James Frey didn’t really do all those exact things to that exact extent. That doesn’t mean thousands of other people haven’t or couldn’t or won’t. It makes his story less accurate, but it doesn’t make his story any less true. As a society, we disregard that thought: if we can’t attach that story to one good-looking personality, deify them on Oprah, and see them as a shining example to the rest of us, then we just couldn’t be bothered, could we?
Sure, James Frey (and Doubleday) made some big mistakes in how they approached and marketed this book, but I call it equally the fault of a book-selling community and a book-reading community with fundamental flaws in their understanding of what a memoir is. And telling Oprah that the same “demons” that led him to drinking and drugs also led him to make up parts of the book was a cowardly, placating move. Of course it should be public knowledge for anyone who really wants to know that he fictionalized isolated aspects of his book, but:
1) If you are upset that the story has been embellished and his ‘memoir’ isn’t a journalistic text, then you are an idiot.
2) If you read this book, or any book, and believe every word of it without question, then you are also an idiot.
I’m sick of this fucking crucifixion, as if every other memoir on your shelf right now doesn’t contain a handful of embellishments, omissions and outright lies. No one seems to care or call them frauds—but then again, they haven’t sold a million copies and been interviewed by The O. Granted, most memoir embellishments are not so severe, but that’s just an argument of degree. It’s damn near impossible to write a good memoir that is accurate down to the last detail. Not only would that be incredibly boring, but you also have to worry about length, and pace, and protecting the real-life identities of your characters (you know, being a writer). Memoirs are to literature what “historical” movies are to film—some are fairly accurate with minor flaws (Saving Private Ryan), while others focus on getting the half-dozen biggest facts right and then make the rest of that shit up (Pearl Harbor). Andrew Pham’s Cafish and Mandala falls more on the factual side, A Million Little Pieces slides pretty far toward a ready-made adaptation that Colin Farrell could star in (or Matt Damn if he lost 20 pounds). But it doesn’t fucking matter. It’s just a book. It’s not the news. You’re not supposed to be able to trust it.
Memoirs shouldn’t even be considered non-fiction, and I hope this controversy leads to a reclassification of the literary memoir. Journalism is (ideally) non-fiction. Scholarly tomes that painstakingly cite their sources are non-fiction. Autobiographies need to be fact-checked, otherwise they’re not reliable, but a memoir is based on memories, impressions, feelings, and a highly personal point of view—by its very nature, a memoir has to be unreliable.
So get off his fucking back. He wrote a gripping book that should touch you whether or not his arrest record is factually accurate. Quit being dicks and start being glad he’s sober. That’s more than a lot of us can say.
Adam
Here here.