Memoir is not Fiction

what I said, only better

2006-01-28T00:22:00.000-05:00

Amy Alexander on MSNBC, touching on everything I mentioned yesterday, post Oprah, and everything else I wish I had mentioned, especially about the O-ster herself.

I should be laughing, but I'm not. Why? Why can't I just laugh?

2006-01-27T23:56:00.000-05:00

Frey, on whether to write about his recent debacle:

“I think writing a book about this experience would be trying to capitalize on it in some way and that’s not something I want to do at all.”

Funny, right?

Here we go again

2006-01-27T10:37:00.000-05:00

I think this may end up being the year of the exposed fraud memoirist. A reader named Karen sent this LA Weekly feature my way, about a "nonfiction" writer named Nasdijj.

Oprah Culpa

2006-01-27T10:18:00.000-05:00

Well, call me a sucker, but I went from hating to loving Oprah in about ten seconds yesterday. She had me at “I’m sorry.” How often to you see public figures (think about them, politicians on the take, athletes on the juice, the list is endless) ever, ever apologize - that is before a jury has found them guilty, at which point, at their handlers' prompt, they quickly throw themselves at our mercy. For those of you who are reading this blog but somehow managed to neither see nor read about yesterday’s Oprah, it was fantastic. She started off by apologizing, (in close up, very effective) to her audience, to readers and writers . . . . Then she went to town on Frey, who sat there, as someone put it, like a kid in the principal’s office. It was fantastic television. Oprah managed to turn her biggest gaffe ever into perhaps her biggest coup – for better and worse, she’s a media genius.

When she was done with Frey one-on-one, Oprah brought in Nan Talese, his publisher, and let her have it a little too, asking why she didn’t question the book more before foisting it on the public. Talese was clearly squirming, but damn, if Frey was going on the show, how could she say no? To be honest, (because that’s what we’re all about here at Memoirisnotfiction) I really haven’t given the publishers and editors of memoirs nearly enough blame for the crisis in nonfiction. When I reviewed Goat, I imagined an eager young kid who was all too ready to bend the truth, but I also imagined him egged on by an editor. The problem is, the editor’s name doesn’t go on the final product, so the author must bear the responsibility. But it’s the venality of editors and publishers who see something juicy and want to look the other way at potential exaggerations (or worse) that should get a large chunk of that blame. Oprah addressed these issues to Talese, and then she brought on another guest, Richard Cohen, of the Washington Post, who finally used the words I’d been waiting to hear for so long: fact checker. Where was the fact checker? The unspoken answer is, of course, that the fact checker was there, but encouraged to look the other way again and again and again. Cohen also Called Oprah the mensch of the year for doing this show, for apologizing. I do feel kind of like a sucker for buying into it/her so, but damn, it felt good.

After Cohen came the Times’ Frank Rich, who talked about “Truthiness” (man, Colbert is getting a lot of milage out of that. Note to self: coin a term.) and then the Poynter Institute’s Roy Peter Clark, who, rather ludicrously suggested a ratings system for books based on veracity (A VT on the cover for “very true”? Or maybe a KT, kinda true? What was he thinking? But I digress.)

Later that night, though, someone did bring up a good point, a less gleeful reflection. It was a guest on Keith Olbermann’s show whose name I didn’t get. After suggesting that going on the show was still in Frey’s self interest (no such thing as bad press), he noted that he was disappointed. Frey could’ve made at least a financial gesture, offered to give at least some of his profits to a charity (Doesn’t he have a PR person? Wouldn’t it just make sense?), and it would’ve been great for him and would’ve shown some actual effort to atone. Instead, he just sat there and listened, looked sheepish, (but like that kid in the principal's office trying to look sheepish until dismissed, at which point he goes right back out to plagiarize that next paper) and, in the end, even with Oprah begging him to do so, wouldn’t just step up, look in the camera and say the words “I lied.”

Clips of various authors and media people not only going off on Frey but also ripping Oprah were interspersed throughout the show as well, and yet, she comes off smelling like the rosiest of roses. I can still smell her.

Here are a few clips from the aftermath:

Some of the Q&A, from Oprah.com. See her site for a lot of other stuff too.

Virginia Heffernan in the Times

Edward Wyatt in the Times

(Oddly, for a little while after the show, the Times had the entire transcript of the show up on its site, but then took it down)

Rob Spillman on Yahoo

Troy Patterson on Slate

"I say wake up and smell the Zeitgeist. The Truth is so 20th Century. . . ."

2006-01-24T22:02:00.000-05:00

" . . . . Which is why, for my money, the Dark Star of Denison College stands out as nothing less than the voice of a Generation: Generation W — after George Bush’s middle name, Wannabe."

I can but bow down before a man who really knows his way around addiction, recovery, veracity, and funny -it's Jerry Stahl, from the LA weekly, ripping Frey a new one. Here's one more gem, but just one, as you really should read the whole beautiful thing.

"While it’s true, as Oprah declared in defense of her bitch, that jail marked a fraction of the time devoted to actual rehab action, it’s jail that lends the whole thing cred. You can jive the bad-boy-adoring sorority girls, but dope fiends know. Jail is the alky and addict’s Vietnam. Right up there with Hep C, an ex-spouse or two, and a Buick LeSabre last parked somewhere in Reseda that’s still missing. "

Surprise, Surprise: The other 400-some pages are full of Frey tales too

2006-01-24T09:19:00.000-05:00

"Frey tales," get it?!? Anywho, gentle readers, here, from today's Times, Edward Wyatt's "Treatment Described in Memoir is Disputed." One notable bit from the article: ". . . counselors said they had decided to speak publicly because they feared that Mr. Frey's portrayal of rehabilitation was more likely to scare people away than lead them to seek help."

The Onion Weighs In

2006-01-23T15:23:00.000-05:00

"A Million Little Lies"
Perhaps I'm taking it all to seriously.

"In fact, Frey is the Vanilla Ice of American letters. . . ." / J.T.'s new Movie has a Cred Problem

2006-01-23T11:30:00.000-05:00

". . . . He's a rich white kid whose self-loathing led to a drug problem. He cleaned up, tried to sell screenplays, tried to sell a novel, and finally decided to market himself, by inventing enough infamy to grant him street cred."

The above is from Steve Almond's "Memoir as fiction? Not so fast." from today's Boston Globe. It trudges on some familiar territory, but does so well, and paragraphs like the one above make it worth the read. It also hints at the suggestion not only that Frey "cleaned himself up" but that he tried to get just dirty enough that the cleaning would make good material, and when it wasn't good enough, he made it good-er.
***
On Leroy and Deception
I also read, in todays WWD (WWD.com) that Palm Pictures has a problem on their hands. They're marketing the new film of Leroy's "The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things" with at big fat "Based on a True Story" across the bottom of the poster. WWD seems to have something of a scoop here. A quick googling finds the poster nowhere else online, certainly not on the Palm website. On director Asia Argento's site, however, one finds what may be the replacement poster, but one also finds a Reuters clip that starts off:

"At the age of fourteen . . . J.T. Leroy was a street prostitute, high on drugs and fast heading for self-destruction." Looks like there's some more clean-up to be done. And, more and more, it's starting to look to me that what Frey did and what "Leroy" did aren't so different. To literary folk, sure, there's a big difference between fiction and non-, but they've both perpetrated hoaxes to bank on their supposed near self-destruction and redemption to sell art, so maybe the matter of wronger, contrary to what I've thought earlier, is just picking at nits. I have a lot more inherent contempt for Frey, in part having to do with the utter undermining of an entire genre, but J.T. is no prince/princess either.

On Frey and Redemption, and a note on Sir or Madam Leroy

2006-01-18T21:47:00.000-05:00

In the past week, I've exchanged emails with a woman who is sympathetic with "James," as she calls him. She asked me what I would do to him, how I would punish him, would I ask him to give all the money back? I replied that punishment is not my job, but that yeah, giving all the money to charity would be a good start, and to promise never to make another dollar based on the fame (infamy, fame, same diff these days) he now has, maybe take a day job. Maybe promise that he'll submit to publishers any of the fiction he now plans to write under a pseudonym (not to use his name), that is, to start from scratch as a writer. But what interested me most about our interaction, as it did with the Oprah and "James" fans who called Larry King, is how much the redemptive tale Frey told had moved them, and how much they just wanted him to stay redeemed. Powerful stuff this redemption.
***
People have asked me why I haven't addressed the J. T. Leroy issue more. Three reasons. One, there haven't been nearly as many or as interesting pieces written about it. Two, my passion/obsession is with writers abusing memoir. Three, I just don't know where I stand on the issue. I am not a Leroy fan, not a Leroy hater. I have read stories but not entire books. Were I a fan, I might feel betrayed. But I do feel that fiction writers are entitled to hide their identities. That he/she misrepresented himself/herself as someone who has lived a similar life to his characters may make him/her a really lousy person, but does it make his/her work illegitimate? You tell me. A couple of women named George (Sand & Eliot) don't seem to get much grief for having hidden their genders these days. But that's facile and cute, if marginally amusing; I'd really love to hear from someone who's not a celebrity but just a Leroy reader, a lover of the work, on how he or she feels about Leroy's unmasking. The press/media has been pretty quiet about it all - perhaps Leroy picked the best week ever to be exposed: Frey is taking all the heat.

". . . memory is inherently a fantasy but, for just that reason, you become more concerned about the truth, not devoted to its embellishment . . . . "

2006-01-18T13:36:00.000-05:00

Psychologist, writer, recovering alcoholic Cliff Bostock offers his take on Frey, recovery, the use and abuse of honesy . . . .

Frey Publisher: "It was received as nonfiction, as a memoir."

2006-01-18T10:56:00.000-05:00

Sheelah Kolhatkar, in a cover story for the New York Observer, talks with Nan A. (Frey's original publisher) and husband and New Journalist Gay Talese about the scandal. Ms. Talese goes on record as saying that the book was never presented as fiction, so was never considered as such. Several other publishing industry interviews make this well worth reading.

Michiko Kakutani on reality, deconstruction, objectivity, Frey, Oprah . . . .

2006-01-16T22:12:00.000-05:00

From , the NY Times, Jan. 17, "Bending the Truth in a Million Little Ways" :

"Mr. Frey's embellishments of the truth, his cavalier assertion that the "writer of a memoir is retailing a subjective story," his casual attitude about how people remember the past - all stand in shocking contrast to the apprehension of memory as a sacred act . . . . "
"His distortions serve as an illustration of a depressing remark once made by the literary theorist Stanley Fish - that the death of objectivity "relieves me of the obligation to be right"; it "demands only that I be interesting." "

(On a tangential note, does anyone else, reading the first segment, think that perhaps "retailing" is a typo?)

That aside, reading the righteous eloquence of Kakutani, Karr, and all the others noted in previous posts, I am relieved to read so many powerful voices on the issue, re-infuriated at Frey, Random House (owners of Frey's publishers, Doubleday and Anchor), Oprah, and, in the end, I'm nearly dumbfounded: they do the writing so I don't have to. And that's no lie.

"If James Frey does indeed have an addiction problem . . . "

2006-01-16T21:57:00.000-05:00

. . . "he is --- by the terms of the only therapy I know that works --- still addicted. "You're only as sick as your secrets," they say in AA. Does anyone out there think Frey only lied about the "five per cent" of the book he admits to fabricating? I mean, do you really think someone can be only a five per cent liar?"
-Jesse Kornbluth on Frey, lies, addiction, and more.

"Surely, many people who are flocking to memoirs and reality TV are missing the essential secret about fiction. . . .

2006-01-15T13:53:00.000-05:00

. . . . It’s truer than the truth." - from "Why I Write Fiction," by Patry, on Metaxucafe.com.

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

2006-01-15T13:37:00.000-05:00

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.

Memoir as Adaptation

2006-01-15T13:17:00.000-05:00

Randy Kennedy's "My True Story . . ." is one of two Sunday times pieces on Frey. He points out that the "redemptive message" of Frey's book is one among many reasons that readers are rushing to defend it. But what suddenly struck me this morning is how willing so many millions of people are to stand up and fight for anything Oprah tells them to, which makes her defense of Frey all the more reprehensible. Will this week's brouhaha make writers and publishers more careful. Why would it do that, when A Million Little Pieces finished the week number one in sales on Amazon? Or is it more likely that memoirs will soon be looked at as literary film adaptations of one's life, in which whatever makes the book "work," no matter how revisionist, is a-okay if you walk out wiping tears and feeling uplifted.

"In book publishing today, one person's opinion matters most. . . . "

2006-01-15T08:37:00.000-05:00

". . . . Oprah had rehabbed Frey's reputation."
I include this Newsweek rehash in large part for the lovely picture of James and his mommy. Normally, I wouldn't crack on a guy for having a close relationship with his ma, but in this case, when it's such a tough guy, using and hiding behind her (w/ CNN's help) so cravenly, well, check the photo and judge for yourself. Also check out the link, on the lower right, to an audio interview with Mary Karr, who writes actual memoirs and even knows how to use words (!), and publisher and editor Peter Osnos. Karr points out that if she found out that Hellen Keller turned out to be just nearsighted it would really have burst her bubble. She also notes that she held herself to a much higher standard in terms of factual truth in her memoirs than her publisher ever did. Osnos discusses the importance of memoirs today, the difference between embelleshing and inventing, and makes the point that (regarding, among other elements, the fact that even after the discovery of blatant lies in a nonfiction book, Oprah's imprimatur/reprieve has actually boosted the books sales) "this book, as a statement, is something we should all be worried about."

"Frey’s rage, it now seems, was mostly a rage to succeed."

2006-01-15T08:32:00.000-05:00

Here's a short NY Mag piece by John Homans.

Wow, this really isn't going away

2006-01-14T22:46:00.000-05:00

CNN is interviewing pundits and issuing polls. Not verbatim, but I believe the question was "Should authors be held to the same standards as journalists?" What the heck is an "author"? Which standards? Didn't CNN used to be a news source? Ted Turner is rolling in his grave (what, waddaya mean "not dead"? Are you sure? Where's our fact checker?)
*
Also, A reader is suing Frey. According to the Reuters story, by a guy whose name happens to be Art(hur) Spiegelman:

"Saying they were acting on behalf of Pilar More, a mother of two, who felt cheated by the revelations about the truthfulness of "A Million Little Pieces," the Chicago law firm Dale and Pakenas filed suit in a Cook County, Illinois, court against the book's publishers, alleging consumer fraud."

The beauty part is that the suit seeks to launch a class action suit against Frey.

Maureen Dowd on Frey and Oprah

2006-01-14T17:46:00.000-05:00

Below, from a Jan. 14 Maureen Dowd column (you gotta have the Paper of Record's paid subscription to read the damn thing online). I consider the below to be quoting, okay Times Lawyers?:

"Journalism, politics and publishing have been tarred by scandals that have revealed a chilling insensitivity to right and wrong. Random House isn't concerned that an author makes up stuff in a book labeled nonfiction; it just kept counting the money after The Smoking Gun exposed James Frey's lies about his own life.
When Mr. Frey went on "Larry King Live" with his mom to defend his book's "essential truths," Oprah Winfrey called in to back him up. She sounded disturbingly like Scott McClellan. Despite doubts about facts in the book, she said, "the underlying message of redemption" still "resonates" with her. She should have said: "Had I known that many parts were fake, I wouldn't have recommended the book to millions of loyal viewers. I wouldn't have made this liar a lot of money." She should take a page from Stephen Colbert and put the slippery Frey on her "Dead to me" list."
-M. Dowd

Truthiness!

2006-01-14T10:21:00.000-05:00

Some people seem to think lying is funny. Take Tim Carvel in the Times, for example, please. (Previous sentence, fyi, is witty reference to a time-honored comedic gem regarding spouses and a play on the word "take.")

"Now, can anyone tell me what a "fat otter with a flat, armored tail" actually is?"

2006-01-12T12:45:00.000-05:00

I give you, by John Dolan, the best book review ever written, "A Million Pieces of Shit."
Thank you, John Dolan.
I feel a little better now.

And Another Thing: re Reading Memoir

2006-01-12T12:30:00.000-05:00

Another reason (on top of the money that memoir pays relative to fiction these days) it's extemely tempting to call something memoir is it relieves the writer of so many skills that fiction demands. When we read someone's "true" story and we empathise with him/her, we worry exponentially less about plot, about character development, about sentences and paragraphs and exposition than we would with a novel or a short story. And by we, dammit, I mean everybody. We think, Dood this is this guy or gal's actual story of something that actually happened to them that is in some way interesting to us. So long as the author has some semblance of a voice (which is also way easier to come by in memoir than fiction, as I see it), and a good juicy story, we'll go along for the ride. Oprah sure did. And, as you well know, Oprah is us.

A lighter note

2006-01-12T03:37:00.000-05:00

A fairly amusing take by Seth Greenland:

"The word literally means "my story.""

2006-01-12T00:05:00.000-05:00

Saw James Frey, who (re)started me on this rant, on Larry King tonight. King seemed lost, hadn't done his homework, threw mostly softballs pretending to be hard, to the effect of, "But memoir is supposed to be true, right?" Avoiding the specifics because he really didn't know what they were. There was much talk about how Oprah (who has ecstatically endorsed Frey's A Million . . . on her show) would respond to the attacks. Very, very much talk about Oprah.

Frey repeatedly asserted that memoir should somehow be immune to scrutiny. "I wrote a memoir . . . . The word literally means 'my story.'" Hmm, nice byte, but in my dictionaries, the word derives from French and Latin for "memory." Another nice, well rehearsed and equally deceptive sound chunk, at least thrice repeated, was Freys assertion that "18 pages, less than 5% of the book [the text that Smoking Gun contested], falls within the realm of fiction." Of course, those eighteen pages are just where he was actually caught lying, but who am I to quibble.

So, in effect, Frey was asserting/accepting that at least an entire eighteen pages of his nonfiction book are pure fabrication, but memoir is "his story" (not "history," for criminy's sake, it's "me moir."), so he can manipulate it as he sees fit and still be telling, as he put it several times, "the essential truth of my life,” another mantra-byte of the hour.

In the midst of it all, Larry kept asking if all this hoo-ha would make Frey start drinkin' and druggin' again, maybe even kill himself like Jerzy Kosinski eventually did after people called his "nonfiction" Painted Bird into question. (King suggested the Kosinski causality, not I.) King's behavior was almost creepy enough to make you start rooting for Frey. Almost.

Near the show's end came what I thought would be the sappy TV kicker. Frey's rather charming, tough, smart middle-American mom came on and stood by her son. Yep, instead of one of his critics from the Smoking Gun, CNN opted to bring on Frey's mommy. Maybe they'll do that next time Dick Cheney is on the show. Heck, let's just bring out Mom for everyone from now on. At that point, it became pretty clear how fair and balanced CNN was going to be in the end. And just when I thought that was it, the hour was up, I was mad as hell but I didn't have to take any more . . .

. . . on the hour of ten, back from commercial break, time for Larry to sign off and let Anderson Cooper do his thing, guess who called the show, made it run over time!?! No, really, guess. Yup, none other than Oprah herself, who, I can barely stand to tell you, although I'm sure you've already guessed by now, stood firmly by the emotional truths of her brave author. She mentioned, with a chuckle, that she'd been trying to get through all hour and kept getting a busy signal (can't you just see her standing in a phone booth on a freezing Chicago corner furiously redialing). And so it goes. The faux last-minute reprieve as an all too appropriate ending. Mediocrity (Frey really did come off like your basic lifelong fuckup who somehow managed to write a sensational book and hit the literary lotto) rises to the top, dishonesty is rewarded and re-rewarded, and Larry King and Oprah Winfrey call each other lovey-dovey nicknames (no, really) as they say goodnight. God Bless America, Just say no, tell your story, even if it's not exactly, well, your story. I think this may be a one day blog. It's just too upsetting to stick with.

smoking gun piece that started the Frey shitstorm

2006-01-11T18:07:00.000-05:00

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/jamesfrey/0104061jamesfrey1.html
Here's a snippet:
"Of course, if "A Million Little Pieces" was fictional, just some overheated stories of woe, heartache, and debauchery cooked up by a wannabe author, it probably would not get published. As it was, Frey's original manuscript was rejected by 17 publishers before being accepted by industry titan Nan Talese, who runs a respected boutique imprint at Doubleday (Talese reportedly paid Frey a $50,000 advance). According to a February 2003 New York Observer story by Joe Hagan, Frey originally tried to sell the book as a fictional work, but the Talese imprint "declined to publish it as such." A retooled manuscript, presumably with all the fake stuff excised, was published in April 2003 amid a major publicity campaign."

Memoir is NOT Fiction

2006-01-11T15:04:00.000-05:00

Memoir is Not Fiction

I write creative nonfiction and fiction. The two are not interchangeable. I am starting this blog to reiterate those two simple statements, and to keep track of and discuss and vent about the authors and editors and publishers who are misusing the nonfiction moniker to make a quick buck.

About a year ago, for the San Francisco Chronicle, I reviewed a so-called non-fiction title, Goat, by Brad Land . Goat contained one glaring misrepresentation of chronology that made Land into much more of a positive, even heroic character than the truth would have done. I happened upon Land’s prevarication by accident, or by just plain stupidity on his and/or his publisher’s part. In the press kit for the book was included and interview Land did with Publisher’s Weekly in which the author himself made it all too clear that the chronology of actual events wasn’t the chronology he had written and published.

Without going into it in too much detail, in Goat, Land claims to have taken bold, scary, moral action - quit an abusive frat - before a close friend died after a brutal hazing. The book even included a heartfelt conversation with said friend after Land quit but before the friend died, in which the friend praises Land for his action.

According to the PW interview, though, Land quit the frat after, and at least in part in response to, his friend’s death. To me, this misrepresentation undermined his whole story and his credibility – after all, if he faked that big an element (right down to a self-congratulatory conversation with a dead man), how many smaller facts did he fudge thoughtout.

After I reviewed Goat, Land, or his representatives, called my editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, furious. My editor, Oscar Villalon, stood by me, offered Land or his reps the chance to write a letter to the editor. Oscar then contacted me and told me I was welcome to write a response to their letter. Neither Land nor his publisher contacted the Chronicle again.

Why does this irk me so, over a year later. Am I jealous of Land’s success? Sure. But I also thought that “Goat” was a crummy, slapdash book by an author who wasn’t ready to publish. It was sensational, it found an editor who saw dollar signs and rushed it to press. I imagine the editor, not Land, being the one who said, “Hey Brad, if you just change the order of things here a little teensy bit . . . .,” but that by no means lets Land off the hook. The book was optioned for a movie, and Land has gotten another book deal. Yes, I would like all these things. But I would also like to read nonfiction that the author has made every effort to make, dare I say, true.

In any recreating of memory, we inevitably fictionalize. But we simply must make the effort to tell the truth as best as we can remember it in something we are choosing to call (and benefit from calling) nonfiction. Anything else is a betrayal of the reader. In my essay, “Peep Show,” I attempted to recreate one particular scene, at a reading I gave. In so doing, there were things I didn’t remember, or didn’t trust my memory of. As I have written in a follow up piece to “Peep Show” that’s yet to be published, “Did she wink, or just smile as she left the building? I remember a wink, but my memory may have embellished. So I left it at a smile when I published my “true” story – I know she smiled. Regarding certain other elements, I relentlessly quizzed people who were there to make sure I got it right. And “right” really is the word. There is one particular part of “Peep Show” that always makes people ask “Did that really happen?” I resist my impulse to anger, only because, in the past few years, many readers have come to accept that the true stories they read aren’t necessarily true. I don’t think we should ever accept that.

This fall, I participated in a nonfiction workshop as part of my MFA study at UMass Amherst. One day we had a lively, even heated discussion of what was allowable in a work of nonfiction. Flights of fancy/fantasy are fine, sure, so long as they are acknowledged by the author, was my argument. It remains so.

If something one writes is not factually true (again, to the best of one’s and one’s factchecker's ability) there is no excuse for not calling a work “fiction.” Autobiographical fiction is a time-and-critically-honored genre – it’s just not one that makes as much money as memoir these days. The pressure from oneself or from an editor to call something a “memoir” because it will stand a much greater chance of success in the market is nothing even vaguely like an excuse.

In this blog, I hope to bring up examples, relating to the above issues. I’ll discuss other books that have come under scrutiny (from authors ranging from Vivian Gornick to Truman Capote to, now (and what's reawakend my peevedness about all this) current scandals involving "memoirist" James Frey and novelist J.T. Leroy [a tangential, but related issue, Leroy's hidden identity – Unlike my stance re fictionalizing, I don’t really see what “J.T. Leroy, whoever he or she may be, has done wrong by writing fiction under a pseudonym and even a public mask. I don't recall Georges Elliot or Sand getting too much grief about it, but then again, I was very young when they were writing.])

Links to Jame Frey stories to come this evening - oh, and he's on Larry King tonight. If you don't know who I'm talking about, just give him a google.

Thanks.

-Jamie Berger