Well, of course not; that would be silly. But the headline’s got to be catchy, right? In any event, I was curious to see how memoirists viewed some of the themes that had emerged during the James Frey and Nasdijj scandals, so I asked around to learn more about how other writers approached the craft of memoir writing, and how they think the public might view their efforts in the post-Frey era.
“For me, the act of memoir writing was one of desperation—a last-ditch attempt to discover who I was,” recalls Wendy Kann, author of the forthcoming Casting with a Fragile Thread. “I did justify the hours, days and years that I spent holed up in my office by imagining I would eventually publish and, as such, tried to structure the events in my life according to what I thought would be an accessible narrative thread.” But in doing so, she says, “I never considered not writing the truth.”
There’s much more after the jump—read on!
Mike Mewshaw concurs with that sentiment. “I’m never tempted to tweak things to make them more dramatic,” says the author of If You Could See Me Now, which comes out next month. “First because the books I’ve written contain incidents that are sufficiently dramatic in and of themselves, and secondly because I’m hyper-alert to my professional responsibilities.” Mewshaw’s journalism background may shape that perspective to some extent; in writing this third memoir, for example, “I have been extraordinarly conscientious about using public records, documents and letters supplied by people involved, and carefully recorded interviews.” But the larger issue of accuracy vs. artistry is one all memoirists find themselves grappling with at some point.
“Writing memoir, like all art-making, requires leaps of imagination as well as rigorous control,” says Bernard Cooper, whose The Bill from My Father (also a third memoir) has recently arrived in bookstores. “The list of aesthetic decisions—in any book and in any genre—are numerous. In memoir writing, these aesthetic decisions, hopefully, are made in the service of getting at the truth, or at least trying to get at it to the best of one’s ability.” But what James Frey did, in fabricating a jail term for himself, was in Cooper’s view “part of the swaggering persona he valued more than he valued good writing and the givens of his own experience.” He notes that from the beginning, long before Oprah came along, Frey celebrated himself as someone working with raw experience, not literary fussiness, and the sloppiness and posturing in his prose was accepted as proof of his authenticity. Kann, meanwhile, looks past Frey as an individual author, describing the Million Little Pieces controversy as “a symptom of an American public increasingly unable to differentiate their steady diet of sensationalism, pat answers, and happy endings from reality.”
So what effect will these recent scandals have on readers’ bullshit detectors? “I think there are plenty of savvy readers out there who know that all writing, even ‘objective’ journalism, is one shade of the truth,” says Cooper. “I welcome skeptical readers; I’m one.” Mewshaw hopes, too, that editors will look at memoirs with greater skepticism: “Far too often magazine and book editors have taken writers’ word for events which on their very face are implausible and should have sent up red flags,” citing Frey’s infamous airplane scene as an example (but also calling out Nick Flynn on the details of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City).
In the end, Cooper suggests, things are likely to go on much as they have before: “As a reader of memoirs, I want to see the truth refracted from an individual perspective, and what I trust in a good memoir is not that what I’m reading is absolutely true or false, but that I’m in the hands of a writer who is crafting a version of the truth that I trust and find compelling.”