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.
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