morrigirl | A Million Little Pieces

For the last two days I've been paying attention to the scandal surrounding James Frey's best selling memoir A Million Little Pieces. For those of you who don't know, on January 8th The Smoking Gun published an article alleging that many of the central facts of the memoir were fictitious, most notably a series of arrests and a three month prison sentence that no one has been able to find any record of in the state of Ohio where Frey claims they took place. I haven't read the book but it's suppoed to be about Frey's substance abuse and criminal rehabilitation. That the prime plot points may be false has proven quite shocking to many readers. In fact the backlash has been so swift that Random House has taken a previously unheard of step to save face, it is offering full refunds to anyone who purchased the book directly from the publisher. Frey stands by his book claiming he didn't lie about a single thing, though he has been unable to convincingly explain why there are no records of his arrests or incarceration.

As writer who works primarily in memoir this whole bruha has raised a lot of questions for me. Like, when is a lie a lie? Can memory and hindsight ever be trusted to tell an honest story? Is it too much for a reader to expect they're getting a true story when they read something labeled "memoir?"

One of the first things we learned in Beginning Nonfiction Class was that memoirs are almost never the God's Honest Truth and we as story tellers shouldn't get hung up on trying to write the God's Honest Truth. More often than not full disclosure, complete truth, is boring. It's doesn't make a good story. This is why we often exagerate when telling stories to our friends. We jazz them up to make them more interesting. Such embellishments are the stuff of legend, myth, just about every interesting tale that has survived through the centuries. To some degree, knowing when and how to properly embellish is a noble art form.

Tom Franklin gave us a firm example of not-quite-truth the first week of class using his own material. He passed out the introduction to his collection of short stories, Poachers. Though it was a collection of fiction, the introduction was a personal essay about what it was like for him growing up in rural Alabama. There was a pivitol scene where Tom took a walk out to an old covered bridge and had some sort of big realization. After the class read it Tom admitted that scene didn't quite happen the way he wrote it. For starters, he hadn't gone to the bridge by himself that day, a friend of his had come with him. However, while writing the piece he'd known that sticking an extra person in the scene, though honest, wouldn't have added anything to it. The friend in question hadn't done anything to progress the realization that was the central point of the scene, so there was no reason for him to be there in the telling. Furthermore, the realization hadn't come in a single moment. It had built up over time, a portion of it having occurred the day at the bridge. But Tom liked the setting so much, he allowed the entire thing to happen there. He explained that a memoirist's responsibility, like any other writer, is not to the reader but to the story. The reader wants a well written, presented, and thought out story, heavy emphasis on STORY. Good stories, even good true stories, must be molded, edited, and shaped for mass consumption just like a poem or a work of fiction.

Of course, Tom didn't invent any of the incidents in that personal essay. He omitted, he condensed, he stretched the truth, but he didn't outright lie. Even so, given the Frey backlash I think most readers would be shocked to know such stretching takes place regularly in memoir writing since they are under the typical layman's impression that anything with the word "memoir" slapped on it is completely true. Maybe it's just me, but I think the public's expectation of total honesty is a bit too high. No one is ever completely honest no matter what they tell you. Memories fail, history rewrites itself in the re-telling, we invent incidents we aren't even aware of having invented. The population at large isn't totally honest in every story they tell every person they meet, it's ridiculous for them to hold writers, even memoirists, to a higher standard then they hold themselves. Of course, I doubt they realize they hold memoirists to a higher standard. Half the time we come to believe our own embellishments in their re-telling. The lies become truth. Therefore history and truth in general can never be fully trusted. The human brain distorts and each one distorts differently.

In an article I pulled up on MSN memoirist Mary Karr, author of The Liar's Club , my single most favorite memoir ever, said that Frey has "the moral credibility of a sea mollusk." I don't see how she can say that since she says in the same article "Even when you think (your memories) are true, you have to peck and push and nudge yourself...Is that right? Could it have really happened that way?" She admits that memoir writing is a hard undertaking, and you can't always trust your memory. I don't think I can make such a sweeping moral judgement of another writer. Yes, it looks like Frey did invent and embellish most of the important details of his book. But can I honestly say I've never done the same thing? I don't think so. Though I do think a truly good memoirist shouldn't have to invent material to supplement the story, the facts and details on their own should be enough for them to stitch together a nice narrative. But that's just my opinion. That's just where I choose to draw the line in my own writing. Frey's line may be way further down the beach.

Does Frey own his readers an apology? Did he lie to them? No. They picked up his book because they wanted a story. From what I've heard, he gave them an engaging one based loosely on fact. There are half a million books in this world based loosely on fact. No one is asking the authors of those books to defend themselves.