Sunday

The Great James Frey Debate Revisited


This last week my book club we read the Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls. If you haven't read it, it's Walls' memoir of growing up with parents who were essentially nomadic and not super fit to raise your basic turtle, let alone a pack of kids.

To put it as horrifyingly as possible, these people would make my parenting look magazine-cover-worthy by comparison. And I don't even really understand what a Diaper Genie does.

Unfortunately, at the meeting we had a long debate wherein we had to discuss whether or not the stories were real. Were these true, or were they sensationalized in order to sell more books?

I have to say, I'm really, REALLY tired of having that debate.

James Frey, as much as I have enjoyed his stuff, is partially to blame for this, I suppose. I don't remember going back and forth about this kind of stuff before his time in the spotlight. I feel like we all took memoirs at face value before him.

Questioning what we read is not a bad thing by any means, and sometimes it needs to be done. I'll give the example of Jon Krakauer taking Greg Mortensen to (one of his stone-built) school(s). That matters because Greg Mortensen was taking money that people were donating to a charity and using it for himself. And he was claiming to have done great things. That's bullshit, and that's a situation where lying hurt not only him, but hurt the people he was allegedly helping.

But what about James Frey?

The complaints I've heard are:

1. The scene in a million little pieces where he had dental work done without aenesthetic was proven false.

2. He did not spend the time in jail that he claimed.

Okay, sensationalized. But who does this hurt?

The biggest claim of injury I've heard is from people who felt like they were lied to, who felt like Frey's story was uplifting and empowering, and now feel like they were lied to and that nobody understands them.

I don't normally work to invalidate feelings because feelings are not logic and if felt are irrefutable, but I think that as much as those people were being lied to, they also had a failure of imagination. If you can't be touched by a fictional story in the same ways you can by a memoir, then I feel pity for you.

Personally, I was touched by Frey's story, especially so in his second book, My Friend Leonard. And whether or not the smaller details are true is irrelevant to me.

Most of how I judge books, and most of what I remember about books, is how they make me feel. My memory is very weak on the narrative details of a book. It makes booktalking a real bastard, let me tell you. I don't always remember the details and the twists that made me feel certain ways, but I always remember how I felt when I was reading a book. Always.

So if James Frey wants to republish his memoirs as fiction, that's fine by me. And maybe he shouldn't have caved to pressure to try and sell them as memoir. But there are few people in the world who have the integrity to say No to literally millions of dollars. And, from the consumer standpoint, if his books hadn't gained the momentum they eventually had, I may never have heard about them, and I may have never read them. For me, it's still a net win.

As we discussed in the book club, I would also like to make a couple distinctions that I think are important separations between autobiography and memoir. These are my personal opinions, but I think there's a significant choice that is made when someone chooses to call their book a memoir as opposed to an autobiography.

1. Generally, an autobiography is the complete portrait of one's life, and this is usually a life that is generally agreed upon to be inherently important. A memoir is the story of a life, but the story behind the person is generally thought to be worth telling, regardless of the person's notoriety.

2. Autobiography is about facts that can be backed by research and working with other people. Memoir is all about a best-faith effort to remember things.

3. An autobiography is about Capital T Truth. A memoir is understood to be one person's point of view, and it is likely that events experienced by multiple parties would come out differently in different memoirs.

Okay?

I agree that Jeanette Walls probably didn't remember exact dialogue from her entire life. Nobody does. But in memoir, I think the agreement with the reader is that you are going to do your very best to tell the truth.

We do trade away the exactness and accuracy of a person's story when we move away from autobiography. But I think what we trade for is a palatable, read-able story that is from the perspective we want to hear as opposed to being a homogenized version of events.

This is why a David Sedaris essay will always be more interesting to me than an autobiography of...well, anyone. Even if Sedaris is tweaking timelines, adjusting dialogue, and omitting people, his stories are hilarious, and I trust that whatever alterations he makes are for the sake of creating the best, most coherent story as opposed to conjuring something from nothing.

I think what I want is to stop concerning ourselves so much, making the truth about a book the most important factor in our enjoyment of it. That probably sounds lazy, like I'm saying that it's someone else's job to find the truth. I'm not saying that. But what I am saying is that the truth about one of Chelsea Handler's blowjob stories really doesn't matter because I'm not donating cash to the Chelsea Handler Blowjob Foundation any time soon.

Friday

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu


Right now, I don’t know how to feel about this book.

I guess I just need some time.

Shit, that was supposed to be a hilarious joke, but I guess I didn’t mention that this was a time travel book just yet.

Here’s the thing: I have no patience for time travel books anymore. It seems like every time travel narrative goes one of two ways:

Oh banana oil, we’ve traveled back in time and every attempt we make to alter the future only results in us doing EXACTLY what was done before.

-or-

Oh horsefeathers, we’ve traveled back in time and now must not alter anything because it will create an alternate future somehow, although that really makes no fucking sense because it assumes there is an initial point of time travel from which time basically goes wonky, and that point is somehow in the past and also…not.

And really, that’s about it.

In this book, there is somewhat of an alteration because the main character accidentally shoots himself in the stomach, trapping himself in a time loop. Because now the version of him that did the shooting will continue on, only to end up being shot in the stomach.

And see, this all happens 100 or so pages in. Up to this point, I was loving the book. Here are some of my favorite quotes:

On Missing

I don’t miss him anymore. Most of the time, anyway. I want to. I wish I could but unfortunately, it’s true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. If you’re not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter.

On Time Travel Sales

A typical customer gets into a machine that can literally take her whenever she’d like to go. Do you want to know what the first stop usually is? Take a guess. Don’t guess. You already know: the unhappiest day of her life.

Self-Help Books

..books with bright red titles, titles dripping with superlatives, with promises of actualization, realization, books that diagrammed the self as a fixable lemon, self as a challenge in mechanics, self as an exercise in bullet points, self as a collection of traits to be altered, self as a DIY project. Self as a kind of problem to be solved.

Here’s the thing: Up until the point where we get really time-travel-y, the book is great sci-fi because it uses a science-fictional platform to explore very real emotions. Great sci-fi can do that. By stripping away the familiar and leaving the reader without any compass other than the emotional one, a good book can get to the core of a lot of really great stuff.

But then we usually get a paragraph about a laser rifle and I want to pull out my eyeball and fashion it into some kind of a spike that I can drive through my other eye and end my own life.

Because there is a guidebook element to this book, I would like to give everyone a brief bit of advice concerning time travel, just in case.

1. 1. If you find yourself way back in time, I’m talking horse days, immediately change the settings on your iPod in order to maximize battery life. You’re now living a life where you’ll only be able to listen to Queen’s Greatest Hits so many times.

2. 2. If you find yourself back in time, you will likely beat yourself up for not paying attention to history. Do not let this false emotion overtake your better senses. Remember, history is bullshit.

3. 3. If you end up in a certain time period, you may feel obligated to make an attempt on Hitler’s life. But killing him, doesn’t that make you just as bad? The answer is obviously No, so see if you can get a pistol and sneak up on him during the time when he’s trying to be an artist.

4. 4. If you end up even a mere thirty years back in time, it’s going to be hard to pretend to feel excitement over technological advances. But try and act surprised. Otherwise, everyone will think you’re an asshole.

Boo!

Someone was kind enough to put this book on hold for me at the library.

There are recommendations on the back, one by Nicky Hilton, one by Khloe Kardashian. In case you are not a pop culture junkie, these people are both marginally famous for being the SISTERS OF marginally famous women who became marginally famous for making sex tapes, which were of marginal quality, at best.

With recommendations from literary giants like that, who can refuse?

And the world wept for what it had made...


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Cover My Ass Time: This is all happening in a magical, fictional universe. Any resemblance to anything ever is strictly the product of a weak imagination, for which I apologize.