PRINTFar from a memoir
Books that blur the lines between truth and fiction
Lindsey Howald
April 3, 2008 | 12:00 a.m. CST
Close your eyes. Go ahead, close them. Now, try to describe the room you are sitting in. How many windows are there? What color is the floor? Can you remember what hangs on the opposite wall?
Robin Hemley, director of the nonfiction program at the University of Iowa, whose creative writing program boasts a dozen Pulitzer Prize winners, often practices this exercise with his students on the first day of class. While their eyes are closed, Hemley asks each one to describe the classroom with as much detail as possible.
“You wouldn’t believe how many things they not only get wrong, but that they even imagine — and they don’t even realize they’re making it up,” Hemley says. “One time someone completely imagined there was an American flag on a pole above the room.”
Memory, indeed, is a fickle informant. Just ask James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces. After thesmokinggun.com released a report detailing the best-seller’s numerous fabrications and Oprah infamously scolded him on air, the Brooklyn Public Library system re-catalogued the memoir as fiction. Or take Margaret Seltzer, whose gang memoir, Love and Consequences, described her tragic childhood as a half-white, half-Native American growing up in a black foster family in Los Angeles. Just after the memoir’s publication in March, Riverhead Books recalled all copies when Seltzer, a white woman who hails from a cozy L.A. suburb, confessed she made up the whole thing. A mere week before Seltzer’s exposure, 71-year-old Mischa Defonseca admitted to fabricating her heartbreaking tale of Holocaust survival in Mischa: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, which involved killing a German soldier and being raised by wolves. In fact, Defonseca isn’t even Jewish. The list of literary betrayal seems to stretch as far as these writers’ imaginations.
Of course, there are lies — or versions of the truth — everywhere. David Shields’ forthcoming book, Reality Hunger, argues for fusing reality and art. “I can’t write a note to my daughter’s seventh-grade humanities teacher without little lies seeping in … Language is a weird, somewhat whimsical governor,” he writes.
So when does the interpretation cross the line between creativity and betrayal? Memoirists can’t be expected to carry a tape recorder with them at every moment for fact-checking purposes. Imagine — “Hi, Mrs. Howald, this is Random House calling … can you please verify this excerpt of dialogue your daughter remembers from age 9?”
Publishers rely on good faith, says Shawn Mitchell of New York literary agency Sarah Lazin Books. “The author signs a contract saying their writing is true, and the publisher takes their word,” he says. “Having to fact-check the whole memoir would be a mind-boggling, difficult time and a large waste of money.”
Authors can earn creative leeway by coming clean in an author’s note. In recent copies of A Million Little Pieces, Frey concedes that “occupations, ages, places of residence, and places and means of death, were changed to protect the anonymity of those involved in this period of my life.” Yet this begs the question: If all of these details change, which part remains real? If a man is not Navajo Indian but Caucasian; if he is not a former migrant worker but an author of gay erotica; if his mother did not die of alcoholism but is alive and well in Michigan; then isn’t this character a product of fiction? Such was the case with author Nasdijj, whose three highly-praised memoirs about a tragic Native American childhood were revealed as a hoax when LA Weekly disclosed his true identity: Tim Barrus, a white, homoerotic fiction writer.
Whether an author craves fame or is just delusional, a common theme emerges. While out in the real world, people exaggerate to make themselves look better. In the book world, memoirists proudly flaunt their dirtiest laundry. “They want the weird and sordid and the really exotic,” says Maureen Stanton, who teaches nonfiction prose at MU. “The writer becomes an exhibitionist, and the reader becomes a voyeur, and there’s no art or dignity to it.”
The art of the memoir lies in individual recollection and reflection on life events, not the events themselves. However, the sales figures for wild tales — even a true one — might prove too tempting for some authors. Although some truly worthy memoirs have lingered on the New York Times best-seller list, often the highest payoff goes to the most bizarre or glamorous story. For example, a Times reviewer called Mötley Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx’s new memoir, The Heroin Diaries, a “litany of debauchery and depravity;” it continues to appear on the famous best-seller list where it debuted at No. 7.
“Money can drive a lot of things,” says Hemley. “It can drive stories, it can drive whether something is marketed as a memoir or a novel, it can drive a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian to plagiarize. Money, unfortunately, does tend to corrupt.”
— Lindsey Howald
