Q: What’s the difference between Scott McClellan and James Frey?
A: One is a patent fraud who deceived the public just to advance an agenda and make a buck; the other used to be the White House Press Secretary.
If the publishing world made sense, the obsession with memoirs and tell-alls would end with these two. But instead of being treated like criminals, they’re being feted by reporters and talk show hosts infatuated with their improbable resurgences, and their new books – “Bright Shiny Morning” and “What Happened” – are raking in the cash.
Frey and McClellan are the inevitable byproducts of a media environment that fetishizes authenticity and encourages readers to treat books, both fiction and non-, as peepshows. The first question I usually get asked at readings is, “How much of your novel is based on personal experience?” (My answer: “None of your business.”) So it doesn’t take an MBA to figure out how to make money as an author nowadays: Just write something “true,” and never mind if it’s true or not. That’s what Frey did. That’s what Misha Defonseca and Margaret Seltzer did. But the fact that there are hucksters willing to write anything to make a buck is not the scandal. The scandal is that even after they’ve been unmasked, publishers keep publishing them, and readers go on reading them. How many readers of “A Million Little Pieces” asked for their money back? Can anyone doubt that if Seltzer’s bogus memoir, “Love and Consequences,” were published today it would be a bestseller?
In a sense, every memoir is a fake. Rimbaud said Je est un autre – “I” is someone else – meaning that as soon as you project some unified self on the page and call it “I” you are in the realm of invention. Memory gets augmented, descriptions filled in, order imposed. No one faults a memoirist for getting it wrong, as long as he’s tried to get it right. That’s the contract with the reader. But what Frey did was to lie to our faces, and for the sole reason that telling us the truth wasn’t going to sell, a perfectly rational decision, if not an ethical one. In this way, he’s no different from McClellan, who helped the Bush Administration sell a war on falsehoods and exaggerations. The differences are in magnitude of consequence, not in kind.
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But America loves a chastened sinner, even moreso a resurrection. As Sylvia Plath wrote, “It’s the theatrical comeback in broad day… the same brute amused shout, A miracle!, that knocks me out.” How surprised Frey must be to discover that people will still buy his books! But not Harper Collins or PublicAffairs, McClellan’s publisher, who know that celebrity sells – any celebrity, even that achieved through deceit and humiliation. If thousands of people are buying Bright Shiny Morning and What Happened you have to start wondering whether it’s despite the fact that these men lied to us or because they lied to us. You have to start wondering if being lied to, being disrespected, being manipulated, isn’t secretly what we want.
I tried to grapple with this in my novel, “Lady Lazarus,” which is full of public figures fudging their facts – in memoirs, biographies, and in the media. At first I imagined these lies leading to great scandals, but that didn’t ring true. Eventually I had to admit that people just wouldn’t find such lies scandalous. We’re so used to being lied to that nobody seems to care. Lying’s part of the show, the cost of doing business. It is the business, in the bright, shiny morning of the 21st century, whether in memoirs or on television or in Congressional hearings, the mantra here being the deeply pathological rationalization offered by Defonseca: “It’s not the true reality, but it is my reality.” Maybe the real scandal is telling the truth.
There are lots of writers, old and new, who are ready to tell us the truth. Why should they have to compete for shelf space and column inches with those who have already broken their vows? James Frey had his shot. He blew it. If our culture really valued truth, his new novel, and McClellan’s worthless memoir, would be treated not with fanfare, but with the silence of profound indifference.
“Lady Lazarus” by Andrew F. Altschul is on sale now. He’ll be reading in NYC 6/13 at Pianos and 6/15 at KGB