Mary Karr: "In nonfiction, though, there's a different contract with the reader . . . "

Yay Mary Karr! In the Sunday Times, in an Op-ed piece "His So-Called Life," Karr addresses Frey's crimes (and compares them with J.T. Leroy's misdemeanors) just perfectly. She also touches on one bit in the Larry King interview that drove me nuts but that I hadn't yet mentioned here. Frey compared himself to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bukowski, et al, to which Larry, to his only credit of the night, said, in effect, Yes, but they wrote fiction. Frey countered by saying that that's because there weren't memoirs back then. And King moved on to the next question. Karr makes the point that, er, actually, people have been writing autobiography since St. Augustine. She goes on to wonder if he's ever read or even noticed another memoir, especially seeing as Frey seems to think that his is the first one that's ever "come under the type of scrutiny that mine has." And speaking of memor/fiction, I gotta say, as much as I have a bunch of contradictory feelings about him and A Heartbreaking Work . . . ., kudos to Dave Eggers for writing a book that was largely based on actual events, but that Eggers admits, even asserts that he cannot call nonficiton because of his flights of fancy. Some of those flights are wonderful to read, are clearly exaggerated, lushly so, that's what makes them fictionalized, and that's just great.