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.

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...

2011: Living in the Future

The future's so bright, I gotta wear a jumpsuit. Which, according to this book published in 1972, will allow me to match everyone else in the year 2011 perfectly.

So what did Geoffrey Hoyle's vision of the world of 2011 look like?

Well, it's kind of a mish-mash of the practical and the wildly imaginative and slightly less practical.

For example, Hoyle's proposition that switching to a 3-day work week will solve many of our traffic and pollution problems is actually one of the more realistic that I've heard. Not to get too earth-y here, but if people lived in homes appropriate to their family size, the country figured out a food system, and most entertainment was free, I think we could mostly live on a 3/5 salary, and I can't imagine that making me less happy.

However, he also has some less-plausible things going on, such as all foods being prepared by what appears to be the breakfast machine from Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. The time the man spends on food preparation is a little out of hand, especially considering that he's also solved, you know, the little bullshit stuff like pollution. An entire page is devoted to the machine that makes toast, which also has my favorite future-y/as seen on TV sentence: "The toast starts life as ordinary sliced bread." Yeah, no shit. What a mind-blowing future you've constructed for us here. From there, it's exactly like an ordinary toaster except that a mechanical arm picks up the bread and then puts the toast on your plate. So I guess this solves that growing concern in the 70's about picking up toast.

Another weird one is the video phone. He's actually kind of dead on with computers and whatnot, so I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about that. But what's strange to me is how every futuristic show is all about the goddamn video phone, but in real life we have somewhat abandoned the audio component of phones in favor of texting, which is really a dumbing down, technologically. We had texting technology in the day of pagers.

Although I have to say, video phone calls don't sound appealing to me personally. Plus, if you're a busy person, aren't you generally doing other things while talking as opposed to sitting and talking and doing nothing else? Then again, flip side, if all calls were video calls maybe it would cut down on people SITTING ACROSS FROM EACH OTHER AT A RESTAURANT AND FUCKING WITH THEIR PHONES WHILE THEY'RE EATING WITH A LIVE HUMAN SITTING ACROSS THE TABLE. Sorry for all the caps, but stop doing that. No matter who you are, texting at a table when there's only one other person there makes you look like a teen girl, one of the bad ones who picks on the shy but wonderfully spirited protagonists in teen girl movies.

The book also spends a great deal of time talking about school, and it sounds like people will be doing what homeschool kids are doing now. It's so funny to me that homeschool kids are on the cutting edge in terms of linking up to a satellite to go to class, but then they wear exclusively denim skirts and I imagine they churn their own butter for some reason.

Restaurants are not that much different other than the fact that the waiters and waitresses have been cut out of the equation, which is fine by me. I've never met a waiter who said he loved his job, and even though I like to think I'm a pretty easy customer and tip nicely, I never hear anything about it from a waiter, so I'm starting to feel like they don't want anyone to be at the restaurant, themselves included.

Public transportation is clean, free, reliable, and works 24/7. It's safe enough for kids to travel alone. So I guess the future also involved liquifying the homeless somehow. He didn't really go over that so much.

Overall, the future sounds pretty awesome, and it's kind of disappointing that the closest, most accurate page is the one that shows how horrible things were twenty years previous. Oh, wait a second, that was the SECOND-most disappointing thing. The MOST disappointing thing was the picture of a teenage boy playing an acoustic guitar. I hope that in 2050 we will have found better ways to pick up girls than playing a goddamn acoustic guitar. Maybe some kind of ray...

Volt: stories by Alan Heathcock

This book has some very strong stories in it, especially "The Staying Freight" which starts the collection off with a bang and is the best short story I've read this year.

But, as is the case with a lot of collections, it feels uneven.

I think this might be why people tend to do less short story reading. With a novel, you can get involved and assume that you'll be reading one unified story throughout, so if you like the first 40 pages you'll probably like the entire thing. But with short stories, you can't ever know what the next few pages will bring.

This book also fits in with the sort of rural, prairie gothic literature you see making the rounds right now, titles such as The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock, Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, and books by Daniel Woodrell.

If that's the kind of thing you're into, I can't recommend anything more than Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock. I found that book to be tight, consistent, and unified in both its narrative voice and the overall tone.

Alan Heathcock has some good stories in him, clearly. But by the end of the book I started feeling like the recurring characters and settings were restricting more than freeing.

Coop by Michael Perry

Michael Perry has a way of taking whatever's going on in his life and relating it to another, smaller event in such a way that you can understand what he's talking about without him going overboard in pointing it out.

For example, in Truck: a Love Story he talks a great deal about rebuilding an old International, but the real story is more about his impending marriage to his new wife, his brother's upcoming marriage, and the ways in which rebuilding a rusty old truck are similar to a guy who's maybe a little rusty himself trying to build a love life.

In Coop, he talks a lot about raising pigs and chickens, but more than anything it's a reflection on the life one lives while raising a family and how one's upbringing looks different when you're thinking back on it instead of living it in the moment.

There are three things I always love about Perry's books:

1. He has a very easy style. This is not to be confused for a book that's a quick read because it's all plot and dialogue. There's a lot in there, and Perry uses his writerly skills to bring the magic to the reader, making it seem like everything just happened when in reality it must take a tremendous amount of work to get these sorts of stories down on paper and have them read so easily.

2. He's self-deprecating. I know that might not sound like a big deal, but if you read a lot of memoirs, it really is. It's a tough skill to master in life, tougher in writing. Actually, that might be true of almost everything. It's tough to master a skill like small talk in real life, but it's even harder to make it palatable in writing.

3. He never gets too pointed about the over-arching metaphor. Even though it's clearly there, he never has to point it out, and I think you could enjoy the books without even considering them that way.

Coop, though not my favorite of his simply because it talks a great deal about two subjects that aren't really my thing, religion and family, still shows off his aw shucks skill as a writer. It's good for the world to have writers like him around, and maybe he said it best as he described the grief of farmers filing past a casket one afternoon:

...you see these sunburned old dogs approach my brother and break down weepingas they take his hand or wrap him in their bearish arms, and maybe they are wearing big belt buckles or unmodish jeans or have their sparce hair Brylcreemed in the style of a 60's trucker, but it strikes me again how much we miss if we rely wholly on poets to parse the tender center of the human heart. At times like this I am grateful I was not raised to be sleek.

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling

It must suck to be a funny lady putting out a memoir right after Tina Fey. It would be like me putting out a book right after Greg Vance (you probably don’t know Greg Vance unless you went to middle school with me. I’m trying to maintain the fame ratio set up by the Fey/Kaling dynamic. I am slightly less famous than Greg Vance).

But what would REALLY suck is if Greg Vance’s book got more attention, but mine was…well, better.

I laughed, and the way the book was put together helped. Instead of talking about every moment behind the scenes of the Office (for which she writes, awesomely) Mindy Kaling breaks the book up into little sections. Some of my favorites:

“Types of Women in Romantic Comedies Who Are Not Real”
Hilarious, plus this has gotten me closer to understanding the appeal of a romantic comedy than I’ve ever been. Which is still really far, but I feel like I can grasp it in the same way that I can understand THAT some people like birds as pets, even if I’ll never understand WHY.

“Franchises I Would Like to Reboot”
I know this was a joke, but I think I would see Lady Ghostbusters, possibly on opening weekend.

“Guys Need to Do Almost Nothing to Be Great”
A list of 12 easy steps to becoming a great guy. Very doable, even for shitty guys like myself.

And because she had so many helpful tips on how guys can be great, I would like to offer a couple theories to answer the question posed by the section “Why Do Men Put on Their Shoes So Slowly?”

1. For some reason, I think we’ve decided that this is something that can be done in tandem with something else, like skimming a Skymall while talking on the phone. It is not. For me, it’s like brushing my teeth. Something in my brain tells me that I should be able to do something else while I brush my teeth. It should be an autopilot thing, so taking out the garbage and brushing my teeth should be easy to do simultaneously. Cut to two minutes later and I’m either standing in the bathroom with a bag of garbage or walking out to the dumpster, toothbrush dangling from my mouth like a bizarre-looking, foamy cigarette.

2. It may also be an unintentional stalling tactic held over from childhood. As a kid, when it was time to go somewhere I didn’t want to go, I’d take as long as possible to put on my shoes. I don’t know what I thought the result would be. I don’t think it ever crossed my mom’s mind to say, “You know what, you’re slow at putting on shoes, so just stay here and play Sega.” As an adult, I don’t think it’s a conscious choice, but if I’m leaving my home there’s a 50/50 chance that I’m going somewhere I actually want to go, so it might be that leftover, reptile survival part of the brain kicking in.

The big difference I’ve seen between man memoirs and lady memoirs is that lady memoirs almost all seem to have some portion devoted to coming to grips with whatever type of body the author possesses. I’ve read one man memoir where body talk was a big topic, but it was the memoir of a kid who doused a bathrobe in gasoline and set himself on fire, so it was about his body, but more about how horribly burned his body was.

Anyway, it’s always the section I’m least interested in, and the longer it is, the more I start to drift off. And it doesn’t matter the body type, either. I tried to read Jenna Jameson’s book after the 15th time the copy at our library was mutilated, and hearing about her body was no more exciting or interesting. I glaze over without fail.

I think the male equivalent of this is articles about the best way to shave. Every ten minutes there’s a new product, which is new and exciting because it’s more like an old product. And no, I don’t really care how cowboys did it. I don’t do ANYTHING to my body the way cowboys did it, with the exception of drinking weird little potions that always turn out to be just hard drugs mixed with flavors.

So if you’re burned, losing a foot to diabetes, some sort of fishman or rhino lady, or you’re Lucy Grealy, then I’m interested in hearing about your body. But that’s just me.

The book is fast, funny, and has the best photo captions ever written, such as “Rainn Wilson, violent Ogre.”