Folks everywhere are in a righteous huff about James Frey and his book “A Million Little Pieces,” which turns out to be full of fabrications and embellishments. Years ago, I received the hardcover in the first round of publicity. I myself couldn’t get through the first twenty-five pages, and had no idea it was as good as everyone says. It reminded me of the novels of Irvine Welsh, which everyone raves about too, but which I can’t make any sense of. I thought the cover was cool, though.
As you already know, The Smoking Gun reestablished its bona fides late last week in a lengthy investigation that makes Frey look like a pathological liar. (Also, by the way, offering a shout-out to our pal Deborah Caulfield Rybak at the Strib for being quick to smell a rat. Well done, DCR!) Considering how much Frey has stumped for himself and protested against the “haters” and practically dared the entire english-speaking world to knock the battery off his shoulder, I think the indignation is appropriate.
According to at least one report, Frey’s original manuscript was presented as fiction and it was turned down by seventeen publishers. The eighteenth, Doubleday, bought it but insisted on editing it and publishing it as nonfiction. Assuming the best about Doubleday, they presumably tried to eliminate all the fictional hyperbole.
A couple of things I find interesting about this. What does it say about readers (and publishers) that a book no one would touch as fiction rides to the top of the bestsellers list as nonfiction? Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that it’s the exact same book. That means that the story’s main virtue is its sensational plot elements. It therefore hangs its entire selling proposition on the truthfulness of those elements, rather than some other virtue inherent in the writing itself. (Again, a comparison to Welsh is useful, maybe.) That kind of credibility speaks to the persistent cult of celebrity, in which the reading public and the reading industry still care an awful lot about the personality and the biography of the author. That’s natural, of course, when the author writes autobiography or memoir. The point is that we value history more than we value imagination. “True Story!” carries an extra charge of voyeuristic pleasure that you just don’t get from “Amazing fabrication!”
Because we care so much about the biographies of bestselling authors, they must feel tremendous pressure to participate in their own celebrity. Remember what a tremendous flap occurred when Jonathan Franzen, years ago, declined to be in Oprah’s Book Club? That was just a minor, counterpositive moment in the otherwise well-lubricated machine of pop cultural coronation. You write a good book, get lucky with a few positive reviews, pretty soon New York producers are calling and scheduling you on daytime television shows, strange people become your “handlers,” you begin to live in airports and hotels, you begin to make a lot of money, lots of important and powerful people begin to make demands of you, a backlash of naysayers and skeptics develops, and so on and so on. And here, just a few months ago, you were living under a pile of dirty clothes eating off of paper napkins.
Some have drawn comparisons to J.T. Leroy, also supposedly outed as a “literary hoax” in recent days by the Times, which seems to have a personal score to settle. Eariler this week, I sort of defended Leroy, and I do think it’s unfair to equate Leroy with Frey. Here’s why: Leroy, whether that’s the writer’s real name or not, has done little or nothing to inflate his celebrity other than write a lot. With writing success, he was pressured to become another bean in the star machine–talk at awards ceremonies, partcipate in charities, sign books, the old grip and grin tour–and he resisted to the point of hiring performers to impersonate him in public. Again, because Leroy has a unified body of respected, published work, it seems to me more a clean case of pseudonymous writing from a recluse, rather than wholesale prevarication. I suppose I could be wrong; perhaps Leroy’s biography is as bogus as Frey’s, and therefore all that fine literary work is impeached.
I guess I tend to look past the usual distinctions of fiction and non-fiction, and I merely enjoy a good book. I don’t take it personally if a writer makes stuff up about himself–until he becomes pathological and arrogant about it, the way Frey appears to have done. (Or when innocent bystanders are injured as collateral damage… as has been the recurring claim against everyone from Nicole Helget to Dave Eggers.) This is one of the main pitfalls of writing memoir, and no one in the industry will give you a straight answer when you ask if there is any place at all for fabrication in the world of autobiography. But I think you can be sure that if they decide you’re flying too close to the sun, they’ll make sure you fall on hard ground.
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