Copyright 2006 Ben S. Pollock
The difference between fiction and fact
Friday 13 January 2006. I won’t do them the favor of hyperlinking these memoirists, James Frey and JT LeRoy. But there’s the names and here’s a news search engine. Memoirs are autobiographies and factual. The books by these men have been outed as not being altogether factual. Frey’s has stretches of exaggerations and wholly invented anecdotes. LeRoy does not exist but is the creation of a female writer; nor is LeRoy is a pen name. Oprah Winfrey still defends Frey. LeRoy has his or her fans rationalizing on the Internet. (I learned of the two from reading their critics, who in fairness do seem to outnumber their apologists by a lot.)
Journalists who make stuff up get drummed out and humiliated. Memoirists appear on Larry King. (That doesn’t work: Lazy and-or lying big-time journalists get cable news air time, too. Oh, heck, as George II would say.)
The impact seems to be that these authors’ acts now that they are revealed, are controversial, they are not fully getting away with it. Yet actually they are. The book in question is still No. 1 in The New York Times best-selling nonfiction paperback. Nonfiction. Its sequel is No. 1 on the Times’ nonfiction hardback list. Nonfiction.
Professor Harry Frankfurt — author of the best-selling book-length essay, On Baloney, only the word is not "baloney" (and the Times calls it On Bull, dispensing with hyphens or other masking punctuation — was on C-Span’s BookTV last week. His point is that baloney is an important phenomenon not because it comprises falsehoods but that the vendor of it sees no need for truth or lying, just a spiel of words to persuade, whatever it takes. The receiver does not care about veracity so the deliverer doesn’t, either.
This could be the case with Frey and LeRoy. The Oprah says Frey’s message still will help people. LeRoy’s defenders claim to be entertained by having been "punk’d," to use the MTV term for hoodwinked, or is it conned?
[End of January note: Oprah Winfrey later in the month put Frey on her show, along with folks like his publisher, and let him have it. (It’s a searchable story through the news links above.) Ms. Winfrey showed courage in admitting she’d been taken in to the extent of defending Frey.]
I love story. That doesn’t mean I am a storyteller. I can do that a bit in prose, but more as journalism or reflective essays, not story-story. Yet some see stories in ink as a waste of time because they did not really happen. What would they make of this in-between genre, if it can be called a genre? Would feel cheated. Yet these same love movies from fanciful to biopics, fully suspending belief in the former and accepting narrative shortcuts in the latter.
Memoirs, autobiographies, have a built-in fallibility: Memory is not reliable. Yet it’s the effort to be factual that puts them in on the nonfiction shelves, including books by rather deceitful memoirists who know a cleverly written record provides a degree of plausibility (see books of politicians).
Human failings are forgivable. Deliberate fraud is not. It can move the rest of us who try to do right to question our efforts.
I am but an essayist, with an occasional dabble in poetry. It makes me more appreciative of the magic of story.
I don’t have a novel in me. I’m trying to lose weight. -30-
