So Pam Houston was conducting a writer’s workshop in the Vail, Colorado, area over the weekend, and a local reporter listened in on her words of wisdom for aspiring writers, including the revelation that she basically just reprocesses her own life experiences into her fiction. “Houston says the lawyers at [W. W. Norton], her publishing company, tell her to get up in front of the audience and say she made everything up, that her books, categorized as fiction, are not her own life,” the article says. “But she never has.” Instead, Houston told the crowd with a smile, “I just lie to the lawyers.” This winning, winking strategy is, perhaps, why Houston is beloved by the same middle-aged women, from one end of the country to the other, who feel personally betrayed by James Frey. (Also, cowboys and Irish wolfhounds are so much cuter than drug addicts.)
In an earlier interview with Powells.com, Houston clarified that “what becomes nonfiction are events or stories where the metaphors are in alignment with each other and I’m not too afraid of what’s going to happen if I look closely at them.” And if life doesn’t make her happy? “If I know that I’m opening a can of worms that’s going to take me somewhere I don’t understand, and it’s probably darker than I would care to go on any given day and is going to reveal truths that are going to surprise me, probably not all in a good way, then it’s fiction.”