Truth or Dare

The “white lie”—is there such a thing?

Good journalists, they say, have no friends. We have a few, so perhaps we’re doing something wrong. It’s true, though, that anyone who writes for a living makes enemies now and again. Writers of all types are caught on the horns of fact and fabrication. On the one hand, novelists writing under cover of fiction often get in trouble when “characters” recognize themselves in a story. Conversely, if you’re writing nonfiction, there are high expectations that everything in your account will, you know, be true and verifiable and all that. In the past four weeks, the issue has come to a boil, thanks to two memoirists who appear to have transformed their Minnesota experiences from low-voltage, real-life fluorescence into explosive, incandescent scandal. That would be Nicole Helget, the fascinating young writer of The Summer of Ordinary Ways, and James Frey, the successful but embattled writer of A Million Little Pieces. Helget’s story has been generating some static from immediate family and friends for her disturbing rural Minnesota memoir; some of the characters implicated in her tale have decided that the writer exceeded the limits of her artistic license. And Frey notoriously padded his resume as a drug addict and felon, the better to tell the story of his redemption at a Minnesota treatment center.

This all raises the question of what constitutes a memoir, and what rules must be followed. And the answer, apparently, is that there are no agreed-upon rules. While we are inclined to give all writers and storytellers the benefit of the doubt, it will not do to have them begging off responsibility due to the “subjective memory” of the writer. That is a disingenuous dodge. Should memoirists make things up, outside of their own internal states? They should not. Memoir is a fashionable genre, but it is also a chronically troubled one. Thanks to professional jealousy, almost every bestselling memoir is eventually scrutinized, weak points are identified, and the authors are dutifully rebuked. Folks from Lillian Hellman to Dave Eggers have stepped over the line of veracity into verisimilitude. There are those who are hurt by libelous narratives. And then there are the rest of us who like nothing better than to pile on an artist for taking liberties with the truth. Beyond this small epidemic of mendacity, we’re frankly more worried about the clucking, sanctimonious press. In critical circles these days, there is a strong whiff of vigilantism. It’s even stronger than the fume of victimhood that seems to be the exhaust of most popular memoirs.

Other forms of autobiographical art are given much more leeway. Consider, for example, the visual artist. In early December, local artist Gabriele Ellertson succumbed to cancer after living with it, documenting it, battling it, and exploring it as subject matter in her work. This she did for almost two decades in her elegant, disturbing paintings and drawings. It would take a very precise and jaded critic indeed to see (or even to care) where Ellertson might have embellished her own story within the parameters of her art. In the visual arts, we do not think in terms of truth and falsehood. We think of beauty and imperfection. And yet, one of the enduring precepts of civilization is that truth is beautiful, and beauty is truth. We’re not sure that lets an elegant stylist like Nicole Helget, or a successful twelve stepper like James Frey, off the hook. But there is some substance to Picasso’s idea that art is a lie that tells the truth.

And then just a week ago, Bob Feldman passed away. He was the president of Red House Records, an internationally respected folk label based here in St. Paul. Feldman, who was a gracious, funny, and authentic man, will be remembered as a publisher of great stories—though only a boor would vet the Red House catalog for historical fact. Folk music would seem to be another art form that does not truck with questions of prevarication. But then it doesn’t make a lot of sense to ask whether “Honky-Tonk Blues” is a true story, does it?

In the real world, outside the bounds of art, this imaginative approach to storytelling is often called “lying,” and sometimes “fraud.” The other day, Stillwater high school students unmasked one of their classmates as an imposter. You will recall that Joshua Gardner claimed to be British royalty, the seventeen-year-old “Caspian James Crichton Stuart IV, Fifth Duke of Cleveland.” In fact, he was merely an imaginative twenty-two-year-old registered sex offender from Winona. One can’t blame him for trying to reinvent himself—why should pop-culture royals like Madonna and David Bowie have a monopoly on self-reinvention? Is there anything more Anglo-American? But perhaps Gardner ought not to have aimed quite so high, nor insisted on being addressed as “your grace.”

More eloquent critics than us have pointed out that there is reason to worry about a culture that tolerates so much fibbing. Times book critic Michiko Kakutani has written movingly about the ramifications that Oprah’s Book Club has selected Elie Wiesel’s Night as its next title in the wake of the James Frey affair. If Oprah’s view of the Frey controversy is that it was “much ado about nothing,” what’s to prevent readers from denying that the Holocaust, at least as witnessed and detailed by Wiesel, ever happened outside the imagination of the author? And an important larger point needs to be emphasized. As Kurt Andersen has said, the climate of relativity today is a strange one in which evolution is “just a theory,” allegedly on an equal footing with the crank religious propositions of “intelligent design,” and a just war is one that can be redeemed by any number of fungible perceptions and political prejudices that trump the “reality-based community.” When we allow facts to be displaced by subjective impressions, then spin replaces the news, the globe continues to heat up, the voices of antagonism grow shriller, and our attention is diverted from real tragedies large and small.