Coretta King

I was deeply saddened to hear of Coretta King's passing; the Los Angeles Times has a well-written piece on her.

Oprah and Frey

Hilary Frey's article on Oprah's public scolding of James Frey is quite interesting (you might have to watch the ad thing to read the article).

I have to say that I avoided the show (I don't tend to watch Oprah much anyway). I didn't care to see the train wreck, but now I wish I had. At some point, one of the guests "suggested that publishers should institute a ratings system for memoirs, to alert readers to how truthful a book is (an A+, or something like it, going to "State of War" author James Risen; a D to "A Child Called It" author Dave Pelzer); sadly, Oprah and the audience seemed to respond positively to this idea."

Now, this is really intriguing. It's a bit Tipper Gore-ish, but the possibilities are out there. Who needs those pesky prefaces, anyway? Publishers could apply the rating system not only to memoir, but to fiction based on real life as well (thus abolishing the oft-asked, "How much of this novel is true?"). Imagine the time this would save at readings and book signings! You could get in at least one extra latte at the Borders cafe just by refraining from that question. Nobody would have to spend one extra minute indulging in that terrible human trait, curiosity.

And memoir writers would be free of Oprah interrogations should they find themselves in the hot seat--"Why, Oprah," you could point out, "My memoir has a 'B+' rating on it! That means it's about five percent fictionalized. Surely you saw that before you picked The Moose Whisperer for your book club!"

Now, how to rate books so that they fit into this system would be quite a challenge, but there are a lot of out-of-work dot.commers who could fire off handy programs for this. Maybe it could even get the Silicon Valley booming again, especially if they apply this rating system to all different kinds of literature--certainly there could be a way to rate the imaginative scale in science fiction; even poetry could get a truthfulness rating!

Wow, a literary world in which everything is quantified for us--I can't wait! Ms. Strega is so tired of trying to be original and use her mind and creativity that she is darn near tuckered out. I don't want to think anymore; I want the publishing industry to do it for me. Yet, who could oversee this rating system and keep it pure? I know--we could take a tip from Orwell and establish a Ministry of Truth, thus creating even more jobs.

(Mr. Strega wanted to put in a word here: "You've missed the best part! We could apply this to ALL types of writing! Think of it: advertising campaigns ... political statements ... TECHNICAL DOCUMENTATION! Yes! This is a must-do! There must be at least eighteeen different uses for this future rating system! We're All One Or We Are None!")

Hopefully, my dear readers can tell that I'm being totally sarcastic (my therapist says that sarcasm is a form of passive-aggression, but hey, nobody's perfect). There is a point at which I wish that the military-suited guy from Monty Python would appear and say, "No more of this now; it's just gotten silly." I do appreciate Oprah's need to support truth, justice, and the American way, but RATING the amount of truthfulness in memoir and nonfiction? I think that it's the author and publisher's responsibility to find intelligent and clear ways to let the audience know what is and is not in a memoir. By the way, Mr. Strega and I are opposed as to whether Oprah was engaging in behind-covering; I think she was (note that she did her about-face only when there was overwhelming media and public negativity towards A Million Little Pieces). He says she probably changed her mind legitimately. I tend to be a bit more cynical towards these things, but who knows?

Speaking of writing, Ms. Strega is again struggling through The Artist's Way (I believe this is supposed to happen, but damn). Still, I plug through. I keep thinking of a story I was told by a friend of Bill W., about a guy in recovery who was awaiting one of the promises of recovery, his "spiritual awakening." His sponsor said, "How long have you been sober?" The guy said, "Ten years." His sponsor said, "Well, THAT'S your spiritual awakening." Cause, whether I like it or not, the fact that I write every day is miracle enough at times.

Freyed out

I like what Dr. Maggie MacCary had to say about truth, memoirs, and storytelling in general (I like the idea of memoir as fable, though I don't think Frey was attempting to write a fable about his life when he fictionalized so much of the book).

I am getting burned out on James Frey. I realize Oprah had to run for cover once the media and general public opinion plummeted as the breadth of Frey's dishonesty became more and more apparent--but there's a point at which I have no desire to watch this particular train wreck anymore. Still, I wonder. Why has this guy's agent not said Word One? As a fairly new writer, I would suspect he deferred to the words of his agent and publisher--in my opinion, Nan Talese seems to have been a huge part of this equation, and his agent probably was, too--but the agent been absolutely silent.

Speaking of the writing world, I've weathered two agent rejections in a very short period of time--but another great rejection from Molly Friedrich, who wrote me a really beautiful letter on watermarked paper (with a real signature, not a form rejection). She said that my book sounded "interesting and intelligent," but she was not taking on any new projects and was feeling a bit tapped out at the moment. So, there has been a "no"from six agents (only six--some folks go through three times that before they find one), and thus I will be sending out more queries in the next week. This weekend, I am sending my book of poems to Milkweed Editions, as this is their open reading period.

I'm on Week Two of The Artist's Way. I've gone through this workbook before and remember the feelings that surfaced during the early weeks--mostly of the "tortured with self doubt" variety.
Very slowly, I have been regaining a sense of happiness about being a creative person. One thing I've been doing is putting gold stars in my Artist's Way journal when I complete a weeks' worth of Morning Pages--I found (at Kaleidoscope in Santa Cruz) the TRUE gold stars (which are gummed and have to be licked, then stuck on the page), as opposed to the PRETENDER gold stars, which are like regular stickers (okay, either of them are equally as good-I have two packs of the sticker kind, but the gummed kind were what I craved as a kid, and NEVER GOT--I got crappy blue stars much of the time, and red, but never gold). It sounds so silly, but it really makes me feel happy to be the master of my own gold stars!

more agent stuff

I got a lovely (I do mean it) handwritten rejection letter from Diana Finch, passing on the book; she did have some good things to say about it and even some suggestions--I realize agents are busy folks and I really appreciated that she took the time to handwrite a letter to me. I don't usually keep rejections, but I tucked that one away in my files.

So far, the numbers have been shaping up thusly in my querying:

Sandra Dijkstra Agency: personal email correspondence, wants to see revised manuscript, wants to see other manuscripts I have (I have none to give, though).

Diana Finch: handwritten correspondence (non-form rejection).

Brandt & Hochman: personal letter (non-form rejection)

Ellen Levine: emailed her rejection (can't tell if it was a form rejection)

Suzanne Gluck: form rejection

No response yet on query from Molly Friedrich at Aaron Priest (weirdly, it's only been about two months since I sent out this batch--it feels like 10 months)!

I do see that the majority of the time, these queries and sample chapters are getting read, and thus making it out of the slush pile--for that I feel very lucky; at least a few times, I have had personal correspondence by the principal agent--and I have only queried six agents so far. My next batch of multiple queries is going to be a bit larger; I think I will just increase the queries a bit with every batch. When I look at what I've done since I started sending these out at the end of summer, I realize I've barely started and I feel I can put a better effort in.

The good part (I think the best part) is that the "business" part of my mind is starting to kick in and I am getting a bit indifferent to the rejections--a sort of "eh, wasn't meant to be" feeling. I really believe that these things all come together at the right time, as long as I am willing to show up and put the effort in to research the agents and get the queries out..and keep writing.

I am starting The Artist's Way again (I probably mentioned that earlier). It's been helping a lot--all my self-doubt and self-criticism just pours out onto those three daily pages (I cheated a little and bought a slightly smaller notebook, but those three pages are an effort). I don't even know where the self-criticism comes from--but I do know it's definitely coming out of my psyche! Hopefully writing and writing all of this out will start healing whatever wounds these things come from. I think the trick for me is to feel all of the self-doubt, admit to myself all my uncertainties, and just keep the queries going anyway. In light of what could be happening in life for me and isn't, I know I'm lucky.

I don't always agree with everything Julia Cameron says in these books, but I do know that, even though writing is my passion, I often find a lot of things to do to keep me from it (such as writing today and then suddenly remembering that I hadn't labeled the boxes of Christmas ornaments--I divvy them up between the nonbreakables and the glass ornaments, some of which I have had for over 20 years and need to be labeled as "fragile"). But no bull was crashing through my house in danger of smashing ornaments..it was just me, procrastinating. I am proud to say that I put down the Christmas ornaments and went back to the page. One thing I've realized in doing the Morning Pages lately: I'm my own worst creative "enemy," and I know it!

How I Made the World Worse (according to Kate O'Beirne)

Originally I wasn't going to dignify Kate O'Beirne (and her book Women Who Make the World Worse) with a response. From time to time, there comes a book like this, and it will just as soon go away. So, I won't tear it up bit by bit and spit it out..others are doing this far more effectively than Ms. Strega. I just have a couple of points I want to make.

First, the title. "Women Who Make the WORLD Worse." Is she talking about the whole world--including countries where there are still "bride burnings," genital mutilation, and stonings? Oh, she's talking about the AMERICA world...which I guess in her estimation IS the world.

Second, the cover. The cover shows rather dreadful caricatures of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Jane Fonda, Hillary Clinton, and Carrie Bradshaw (typing on a laptop, with visions of Manolos in her head). I hate to let Ms. O'Beirne know this, but Carrie Bradshaw is not real...she's a made-up character, like Kramer on Seinfeld! I don't think Carrie's flings with Big and her shoe-shopping trips were any real threat to America (okay, maybe if we return to the 50s timeframe that O'Beirne apparently reveres, then Carrie's affair with "the Russian" might have been suspect). It would have been more believable to put Miranda Hobbes on the cover..or Samantha Jones...but they're not real, either! I know part of the book discusses this "evil show" that encourages women to feel positive about sexuality (wow, heaven forbid!)..but still. Plus, couldn't she have picked a more contemporary show to trash for its supposedly degenerate content, like Desperate Housewives? Sex and the City is off the air, albeit in heavily edited TBS reruns.

Third, O'Beirne wants us to return to the "age of chivalry." In the real age of chivalry, women were burned as witches and folks could be drawn and quartered, and their heads put on pikes as a warning to others. Yeah, I really want to go back to that. Give me traffic court any day. Alternately, Beirne would like us to return to the magical world of the 1950s and live according to its strictures, since it was somehow a better time (that "better time" included segregation, but her memory seems to falter on that point). She fails to examine the fact that the unprecedented prosperity of the 1950s was influenced in great part by the masses of women who entered the workforce (ie Rosie the Riveter) in World War II. But again, she seems to need ginkgo biloba or something to give her memory a nudge.

Fourth, O'Beirne contends that "homely women" such as Jane Fonda should have been asked out to the prom and given lots of male attention, for then we would have been spared the feminist agenda. O'Beirne's definition of "homely" is pretty interesting. Apparently, I've been working towards it all my life.

reaction to Frey by someone in recovery

Not to stay on this topic forever, but here is an article from someone who went to Hazelden (the same detox facility as Frey) and has, I think, some excellent things to say on the subject. I hope the link works.

Gayle Brandeis says on her blog that she has refrained from exploring the Frey scandal in depth, but makes a good point, in my opinion: "I have been preoccupied with lies that feel more pressing and dangerous--the blatant lies of our administration. If only the media could latch on to those lies with the same wolf-pack ferocity they've shown with these publishing scandals." I agree and keep thinking "if only..." Still, James Frey doesn't have the power to control and manipulate the media in the massive way that our current administration does.

artifacts

I like what the columnist in the link had to say about Freygate.

Been working tonight on the preface to the Strega's Story, which (for now) begins with the line, "In 1988, when I was a grown woman, every artifact of my childhood vanished without a trace." I'll probably change that line, but that's the gist of the preface.

I go on to tell the story of how this happened, and how completely, so much so that my two sisters each had one childhood picture of themselves, and I had none (they only had these because they had taken them upon moving out. I had never thought to take anything, having other things on my mind in my early twenties than the preservation of family history). It's refreshing to take a minute in this book and write in the voice of myself as a full adult who sees her life from a larger perspective. This is probably the most emotional part of the book for me, harder than describing my grandfather's suicide (the writing of which put me back into therapy).

Still, it's not the literal, fixed-in-mortar truth--it turns out there were some far-flung relatives who had a few photographs; these were sent to us in the 1990s, and my father found a few more when he moved. But most of it was lost in the wake of my mother's drinking and the utter collapse of her life, like a house of cards. The gold snake necklace that belonged to Mamma Nonna is in my sister's possession, but she had been given it as a graduation present. My cousin Denise, when I entered graduate school, brought me something priceless--a little shamrock pin that had been my grandmother's (almost a four-leaf clover, but not quite). I have one more thing that is priceless, that I don't even know how my sister got ahold of--a gold watch belonging to my grandmother, one that looks like a pocketwatch but attaches to a lapel. i have it in front of me right now; the hands of this watch are so delicate that it looks like they were breathed into existence. So the vanishment I write about could be disproved as a fiction--but I didn't know in 1988 that I would find even the small handful of things I do have (and of course, I intend to write in the preface about the things that I was unbelievably lucky to find again).

I think ultimately that the process of piecing together my grandmother's life (and the lives of all the other women in the family) has been like gluing back together a china vase from a thousand fragments. If I write about other things in my life beyond childhood, I have the gift of 20+ years of personal journals to look at and keep my memory refreshed (what a trip to read these)! But there are no such diaries from my childhood. I was glad when one of my relatives wrote me and confirmed that Mamma Nonna was a strong and wonderful matriarch, that her husband and my grandfather were "pompous asses," and that my Nonni was exactly as I remember her, too. Any of the oddities of my book have been an attempt to draw close to these women, even to the point of taking on their voices to speak what I can only guess is some version of a truth about their lives (these long narratives do contain the stories I was told about them). I think, too, that I have been trying to piece together my Nonni's life because she, of all these women, is the one I miss the most and whose "face" I try to see again and again in these pages.

Obviously, the media scandal du jour and discussions about memoir make me consider the weird twists and turns of my own book. Which shelf it ultimately sits on in a bookstore is irrelevant to me (except, of course, if an agent and publisher and I all ultimately come to the conclusion that I had to exercise too much creativity in the memoir's writing--I'm thinking specifically of the parts where the women narrate their stories--and everyone feels it would better serve as autobiographical fiction)--but I do know that I tried to draw closer to the truth when I wrote this book, and I am glad of that, because I found deeper truths and connections underlying these women's lives that intersect with my own. Still, these truths are my own suppositions, ultimately--I would have given a lot to know what their own perspectives on their lives were. During the writing of this bit tonight, I stopped and opened the back of Nonni's watch, as I have done a hundred times, seeking a clue that isn't there; I even opened the front to see if anything was hidden inside--yet there's nothing, just a hieroglyph of scratches and dents. So I just keep on building this book out of what I have. As I say at the end of the preface, "the rest is ash."

more about things left unsaid

I thought a lot last night about the childhood incident I am leaving out of The Strega's Story. Another reason I am leaving it out is that I am not ready to write about it in any detail--I actually wrote a short story about it years ago (which wasn't fiction at all, I realize now), but that story is lost (I tended to write things back then and just metaphorically toss them to the wind eventually, probably a good thing). I find I haven't adequately processed it yet, and it may remain one of the many stories about my life that may have to remain untold. I am sure that it was as horrible for my parents as it was for me; they weren't monsters, just immersed in alcoholism and, in my mother's case, a struggle with mental problems that was, in all likelihood, unbelievably difficult for her. In fact, both my parents get a fairly glowing portrait in The Strega's Story (as well as a couple of my siblings--I'd really like to let it rip about some things regarding that, but Ms. Strega has to watch out about turning into Ms. Bitch--or, as evidenced by some things I said before I knew more about James Frey, Ms. Loudmouth).

Still, the point is that I'm leaving something out of my memoir that I can't really handle writing about--but I'm not creating my Italian family out of thin air or creating some weird and utterly false persona for myself (though all memoirists create a persona, I think), for then I would Frey, and I don't wish to. Any fudging or supposition I have to make in my book is to try and bring myself closer to the truth--even just my perception of the truth--of my family's lives (even the points in which I break into narrating the story in my grandmother's persona), to try and present an authentic picture of how they lived. Maybe leaving out the child abuse incident is altering the truth somehow, but my family isn't presented as the Brady Bunch, and, as I said before, I'm not writing a linear autobiography. And I do wish that, at times, my mom, grandma, and other female relatives had refrained from telling really weird stories in my proximity when I was little (but hey, I sure listened)--but that, too, is what happened and I can make sense of them now, even though they generally served to scare the crap out of me then and further my belief that the world was a scary and dangerous place.

As a detour from this subject (which Ms. Strega, I know, needs to shaddup about), we had the strangest experience today. Mr. Strega went out to walk Rubio, then called me out of the house and said, "Take a whiff of the air." I did--the air was permeated with the smell of what my Mississippi-born dad calls "them funny cigarettes." Wacky tobakky, ganja, weed, Herbal Essence, chron, Magic Melody Maker, whatever you want to call it, it wuz pot--and not just a whiff, but a veritable Chernobyl nuclear cloud of fragrant marijuana. I felt calmer and hungrier just from standing outside for five minutes (and wow, all my nausea from my lupus-meds just disappeared)...kidding...hee hee....

Of course we suspected (for a second), the teens in this house, but they swore it was not them--in fact, they told us they were in their bedroom, having a horrified discussion as to whether Mr. Strega and I had finally thrown in the parenting towel and were now blazing up a big fat doobie in full sight (and smell) of the entire neighborhood. We finally came to believe that a marijuana farm (not acres, but the kind that are probably in the hills 'round here) of some kind was being burned by local law enforcement--the pot smell alernated with some kind of fuel smell, and it was all over the neighborhood, not just this house. But Lord, life in these here woods can be...interesting.

Coda: Mr. Strega called the Sherrif's Dispatch to find out if they knew anything about the Marijuana Mushroom Cloud (Mr. Strega made the dispatcher laugh by telling her that it smelled like Bob Marley's lifetime stash was going up in smoke all at once). She had no idea what it was all about. Our theories now run to my usual silliness (someone buring the plants in their fireplace to add congeniality to household heating), to even greater silliness (people trying to get the entire neighborhood high, on the level of the rumors in the 1960s that EVIL HIPPIES were plotting to put lsd in the Los Angeles water supply). We don't know, but since I live in a small town, the truth will probably come out, and it could be even weirder than we think.

etruscan

A nice bit of reading

To cleanse my palate of James Frey, I went to Margaret Cho's blog and found this little gem. Wanted to share it with readers.

Ew! Yuck! Bleah! I don't like what James Frey did!

Sorry--saying "ew, yuck, bleah" probably puts me in the category of Teenage Valley Girl Reportage--but I feel the need to apologize to my faithful readers, 'cause I wasn't aware of the extent of James Frey's fabrications. Ms. Strega gets a little crazy at the full moon. I had some notion that Frey had fudged some details, or made a couple of composite characters, or did a few other things that other memoirists do to make their memoirs readable. Nooo--this guy did whole-cloth fabrications--that he was in jail for months when this wasn't so, for one thing, and that he played a major role in a fatal accident when this didn't happen. Ms. Strega does NOT support this type of pages-long fabrication in memoirs at all. There are times when a few drops of fiction have to fall into a memoir (I'm talking on the scale of trying to imagine what kind of dress one's granny wore in 1930, based on her clothing preferences and the style back then, or reconstructing a dialogue out of a story you were told about family members). This guy REALLY fictionalized--what would have been the harm to him had this book been marketed as autobiographical fiction? Were his arrests not good enough to make a compelling story? Even a "simple" arrest or a couple of hours in jail is often really scary to a young person and can be illuminated as such while hugging the truth close--he could certainly have tried to mine the essence of how that felt to him and made it successful. Another problem with the memoir is that he kept on and on about how he was being intensely honest with himself.

Huge, whole cloth fabrications of this kind are NOT okay with Ms. Strega, as well as blustering about how every word and every fact is true. A lot of memoirists have to tell the audience that they had to guess at what might have been true at times. What would it have cost him to say from the get-go that some of the scenes were imagined-if it were just a small portion of the book, he could have even pointed them out. Reading Lolita in Tehran was a bestseller, even with such a disclaimer). There is a difference--a large one--between out-and-out fabrication and trying your best to reconstruct a scene from truthful things you remember or were told. There are times memoirists do have to try and present an emotional truth out of bits and pieces of truth--but I think one should always let the audience in on this--and it should be very limited in the course of the memoir, not 100 percent of the book (and LET YOUR READERS KNOW, James Frey, for Chrissakes).

There are always going to be folks who come forth when a memoir or any other category of nonfiction is published and say, "That's not what happened," since the memories are filtered through one person's creative lens and may not be the same as another person's (obviously). That's different than people coming forth to point out absolute fictionalizing of large portions.
There is, I believe, a moral contract with readers if you have to insert fictional elements in a book because you are trying to suppose at the truth of an event (as I've had to do occasionally--but always being as truthful as possible to my audience, and always basing everything on things I heard in my family). One problem I've come up against is that my mother was mentally ill in my childhood and was the ultimate unreliable narrator, but I figure I've done the best I can in figuring out which stories of hers were real). I think family stories from "a way back" are always fleshed-out bones, anyway, and they morph through time. Not to say I would fabricate that my dear granny was a gang moll or something due to that--it's just that I do the best I can with the palette I have--but I've NO DESIRE to hoodwink an audience like James Frey did (one of the reasons I talk about it publicly in a blog long before the book is published is to have proof that I was up-front about it all). Ultimately I'd love for my book to be published as A BOOK, a book based on true stories, and be done with the "memoir" category. I took a peek at Dave Eggers Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and (though it's in the fiction section of Bookshop Santa Cruz, as is Angela's Ashes), that copy had no category on the bookjacket or spine (maybe other copies do, or maybe I missed it). I think that's what I want! :) A totally uncategorized book would be just fine with me.

I think what continues to disturb me most is the weird and frivolous lawsuit filed against James Frey (and the "cashmere jacket" metaphor the sharky lawyer employed--why this bothers me is more due to the fact that I work with fiber rather than the fact that I'm a writer)! By the way, I own a cashmere jacket--the label says "100 percent cashmere," even though the lining is satin and the buttons are nylon (and I doubt the internal shoulder pads are cashmere, too). But I'm being very silly--my beef is that anyone can pretty much be sued for darn near anything in this country--whether that lawsuit is adjudicated is one thing, but this is a too-litigious country, in my opinion.

Still, the good part is that the dialogue about fiction and nonfiction is alive and well--even if people simply agree to disagree about it, (or there comes at least an implicit agreement for authors and publishers to act with more integrity), at least writing and books are being talked about, rather than whether Nicky Hilton liked the latest dresses on Project Runway. And that is ALWAYS, I think, incredibly good and important, no matter what--even though I must admit that I do watch Project Runway with my dear fashion-design-major daughter.

truth, memoir, and James Frey

The Los Angeles Times has done some excellent reportage on James Frey. This article provides both sides of the story (including comments by "that certain memoirist" whose books I adore, but whose self-righteousness is beginning to grate). I especially loved what Vivian Gornick had to say on the subject of memoir becoming a hybrid form, that the genre--like all genres and all creativity--is evolving. And why should it not evolve? Thank God poetry evolved, or else we'd all be writing rhymed epics to mighty Apollo.

By the way, in response to questions about The Strega's Story, my "disclaimer" is actually in the form of a prologue to the book (even though I'll probably have a standard disclaimer, too), describing the loss of all the artifacts of my childhood when I was in my mid-thirties--which IS true; my mother lost her home and (due to nonpayage of a storage bill), lost every childhood photograph she had of her children, every picture of my ancestors, everything we owned (from baby books to old dolls to clothing) to show that these people lived. Due to the deaths of my relatives, the loss of things that might have been signposts for me (except that I remember a lot of the photos), and the fact that relatives either cannot or will not speak of the past to me, I have had to sometimes imagine the truth of lives that were important to me, yet whose distant past I know only in whispers and threads. And that filling-in, I think, is okay, as long as I let my readers know this clearly from Page One. My Aunt Anna and Uncle Mike really did have a relatively equal marriage; they owned a store in the North End and Anna was threatened by a Mafia soldier in her fourth month of pregnancy. My great-grandmother really was a strega; my grandmother Mary really was abandoned by my grandfather for Mae West (yes, the most implausible part of the story is the one most absolutely true). My grandmother really did drift from relative after relative in the years after her divorce, and one day finally made a decision to become independent. The friend who pushed her along this path probably wasn't named Ruth, but I've invented Ruth as an amalgam of all my grandmother's friends (especially the ones who were waitresses) upon whom she relied in her life, as a homage to them. My grandfather really was a bit-part actor and really did kill himself on my mother's birthday (though the Internet Movie Database has the wrong date for his death). Still, I have had to suppose how my Aunt Anna did her laundry, or the details of how she met her husband, or the specifics of my grandmother's flirtation with a man when she was young and attractive, yet still married to a man she hadn't seen in seven years, for example.

To be honest, if I were writing closer to my adult life, I wouldn't have to fill in a lot of blanks (when I do write about later things, I will not have to)--but there were so many blanks in my grandmother's life that writing this book was kind of like filling in the picture of a face when I had just a handful of details to start with. Anyway, my point is that all genres really are in a state of change, whether the publishing world or the reading public, or certain writers, want them to remain tied up in neat little boxes--at least that is my own observation, for what it's worth. And so, goodnight.

Gawd--someone's suing James Frey

...it just gets better and better, or worser and worser. A dissatisfied reader of A Million Little Pieces is suing James Frey, contending that the "emotional truth" presented by his book is not good enough and they feel defrauded. Ohhhh...kaayyy...now writers can be sued because someone is dissatisfied with the "creative" aspect of nonfiction. Someone should sue the estate of Truman Capote while they're at it, 'cause the ending of that book (the meeting at the Clutter gravesite) was invented, too, as I've said before. This lawsuit seems just a tad overblown to me--one might as well sue a fiction writer if it's discovered that the work is based on a true story and therefore isn't "sufficiently fictional."

The litigious reader (or, more specifically, their lawyer) contends that if you buy a cashmere jacket and discover that it's not 100 percent cashmere, you can sue on that basis. True, Frey presented his book as being factual (not good, but not a crime)--but a creative work and a jacket are not comparable. Take it from an old knitter--fiber and apparel are covered by very specific laws and regulations; there is no law requiring that one has to label a creative work such as a memoir in ANY way. True, my own feeling is that we, as writers, do have the responsibility to let the audience know when this has happened. Still, maybe we'll eventually see the passage of a Federal Truth in Memoir Act, so that all acts of imagination in nonfiction writing will be sufficiently purged for the greater good and the satisfaction of disgruntled readers.

Well, I could be on my soapbox all night about this, but I better get my labels ready for the time when The Strega's Story is published: "99.9 percent pure truth, exclusive of embellishment."

A bit more on Frey

I very much like what Kim Chernin has to say on the blurred lines within fiction and memoir. The controversy over Frey makes me consider how much this is a "categorizing" culture, to be sure, when the world, and art, in reality are quite fluid.

I also discovered an excellent article from the current Publisher's Weekly; Sarah Nelson raises some interesting issues about the Frey "scandal" and memoir/creative nonfiction in general. Here it is:

Friday, January 13, 2006
Don't Shoot the Storyteller


I shouldn't have been surprised: As soon as it was revealed, on TheSmokingGun.com, that James Frey had apparently fabricated, conflated and/or embellished parts of his bestselling A Million Little Pieces, the bookish world started running around as if in Casablanca: they were shocked—shocked!—that not every single word of the book was verifiably "true."

"A true story should be true," one reader wrote to Abebooks.com. "What a liar!" wrote another. For days, the media speculated that Oprah Winfrey herself—who had chosen the memoir for her powerful book club—was going to be forced to recant. (She didn't. In fact, she stood by her memoir man.) If anyone was at fault, Oprah seemed to say when she called in to Larry King Live, it was publishing folk who misidentified the book as nonfiction.

Lots of media outlets agree. "It's hard to know which is worse, wrote an a L.A. Times editorial scribe, "a writer who acts as though there is no distinction between a novel and a memoir, or a publisher who does not care.

While it's common wisdom in the book business that nonfiction sells better than fiction, there have been many examples in recent years that memoirs sell the best of all. So, yes, Frey, or his editor Sean MacDonald or his publisher, Nan Talese, made a "crass" decision to publish Pieces as nonfiction. Never mind that there's a lot of precedent for such a choice. (Truman Capote's "true novel," In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song, to name two.) Like Nan Talese, the book's original publisher, who was quoted in the New York Times, I believe that a memoir is not "simply" nonfiction. While based on truth, a good memoir must share many traits with the novel. It has to have a narrative and development and denouement. And sometimes that means the larger "truth" takes precedence over absolute accuracy.

This happens all the time, of course, and memoirists regularly get pilloried for it. (I remember complaints from Dave Eggers's family for some portrayals in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and even the sainted Frank McCourt was questioned about some of his recollections.) But memoirists aren't journalists, they're narcissists. They don't claim to tell the whole story; they're only really interested in their own.

So I wonder about all those people who say they feel duped by James Frey. Would they have bought an earnest, footnoted academic treatise on alcoholism if it read like, well, an earnest, footnoted academic treatise on alcoholism? Somehow, I doubt it. But in typical American build 'em up, tear 'em down fashion, they have to have somebody else to blame for letting them believe what they want to believe in the first place.

I'm not letting Frey off the hook , exactly—though I do admire his books and have occasionally interacted with him socially. (Note to SmokingGun: Detailed documentation of this acquaintanceship can be made available.) True, Frey should have reined in his narrative excesses and sharpened his memory. His editors probably should have said the book was "based on a true story," and they might also have issued all the usual caveats about conflation and attenuation.

But vilifying Frey&Co is both beside the point—and way too easy. Like many memoirists before him, who, after all, practice what is known in writing programs as creative nonfiction, Frey produced a compelling portrait of an addict's life complete with all its deceptions and grandiosity—and he gave the readers what they want. He changed some names to protect the innocent, and some details to protect—and, it must be said, aggrandize—himself. But he didn't write front-page newspaper profiles of people he'd never talked to—and he never claimed that Pieces was supposed to be All the Presidents' Men.

Or, to paraphrase another great (fictional, I think) character: When it comes to memoir, readers say they want the truth, but they can't handle the truth. Not unless it reads like a novel.--Sara Nelson

James Frey and Embroidering Truths

The news has been full of something near and dear to Ms. Strega's literary life: the budding controversy over James Frey's A Million Little Pieces. It seems he may have tweaked his memoirs somewhat to enhance the story. Frey contends that memoir should not be held to the same standard of strict truth in the way that journalistic pieces are. By the way, speaking of The Standard of Truth, the famous ending of In Cold Blood (at the Clutter gravesite) was fiction, and Capote made that clear. Nobody rode him out of town on a rail for that. A certain memoirist has blasted Frey for fictionalizing some of his memoir--I remember that one of my professors told me that, when this certain memoirist was quizzed about the veracity of sundry details in her first memoir, her reply was "It isn't important." This "certain memoirist" is soon to publish a piece on truth in memoir, which I find a bit funny because of this; I'm interested to see what she has to say for herself.

Personally, I strongly believe memoir can contain elements of fictionalization(but always, of course, clearly letting the audience know that this is happening, via a foreword or introduction). Apparently Frey is going to put a disclaimer of this sort in his book (he probably should have had it before). I don't think he needs to be pilloried in the media.

I make no bones about the fact that some of my memoir--the historical parts and the parts in which I actually speak in a character's voice (such as the long parts narrated by my grandmother) have been fleshed out severely from bones of story told in my family (though everything has an extremely strong basis in true happenings, in much the same way that The Joy Luck Club has a strong basis in real events). My book is thus a blend of historical "fiction" and memoir, which of course makes it very hard to place into the strict category of either--but that's the way it's emerged. I really had no other choice but to suppose what had happened in certain circumstances--most of my older family members are dead and there is no way to know exactly what happened. Still, my intention when the book is published is to make absolutely clear--in an introduction or a foreword-of what I had to do in certain parts of the book. I am driving at essential truths about my family of origin in certain chapters. Whether the book is ultimately marketed as memoir or fiction is probably more up to editors and agents than me--though I don't, for example, want to change last names. Part of the intention of this book is to memorialize people I have lost from my life. Whether I've had to flesh out details of what I supposed my aunt and uncle's North End store looked like in the 1920s is probably irrelevant to what I am driving at (though for those who have read "the Mafia story," that's extremely close to the way that story was told in my family). Still, I have no problem with letting my audiences know that, though all of the book is based on true stories in my family, some of the details have had to be fleshed out, in some instances more than others.

I would hate to see memoir as a genre be put into a strict corset in the way that I'm seeing in the media over the last few days. Memory often doesn't tell the truth, anyway, and to truss memoir up in cords of absolute truth-telling will, in my opinion, keep this genre from evolving. I don't know if Frey contended that his memoir was absolute truth (he could have put a disclaimer in the intro if that was the case--even Reading Lolita in Tehran has one, essentially that names and circumstances have been changed to protect people). I think that there is room to be creative in memoir in ways that one can't be in other forms of nonfiction--though I do think letting the audience know from the get-go when this has to be done is very important. I do love what Oprah said about the book, that it has an important essential message (she gets it, for sure, about the fluidity of memoir and its purpose). Memoir, at times, isn't about presenting a Polaroid of the past as much as it is about capturing the heart of experience, the deep essence.

I also think that Frey's pillaging over the last few days--Random House is offering refunds on his book, for one thing--is an example of the arch-conservative overlay that I feel is starting to filter through into the publishing world during this Bush era. Apparently memoirists must tell the truth at all costs and forget creativity these days--so I fear for other memoirists now whose works will fall under the magnifying glass. It may also make publishers less willing to take on memoir--and a lot of stories will then be lost to the world. Of course, it could have the opposite effect and bring memoir more strongly into the foreground. At the very least, it's opened up a huge dialogue about it.

That's my soapbox rant for the day, for what it's worth.

another rejection slip from the round file

Wow--this is a great rejection slip (found in Poets & Writers)--I guess even M. Proust wasn't immune to them:

"Remembrance of Things Past was returned to its author with a curt 'I can't see why a chap should need thirty pages to describe how he turns over in bed before going to sleep.'"

That just makes me want to gag on a madeleine (even though I've never, I must confess, read ROTP, at least not in English...read excerpts years ago in my French 3 class, but I've forgotten it).

no resolutions

I have been blog-neglectful, mostly due to alternating between sloth (including watching the Baguette Cam) and working on both the poetry book and the memoir. Plus, the house has been brimful of kidlets; for example, my elder daughter had her friend over; they both came upstairs during the evening, wearing green facial masques. They also played the stereo until all hours. I am glad that my elder daughter's vacation from school lasts until the end of the month; I always miss her a lot when she is gone--still, it's gratifying to watch her grow into such an incredible young woman.

I have made no New Year's resolutions for myself, finding that they are preprogrammed ways for me to beat myself up emotionally. I have, however, made a determination to get healthier this year, as my two chronic illnesses (lupus and fibromyalgia) have been very troublesome over the last two months.I made an appointment with a nutritionist at the local Women's Heath Center and she gave me some sane guidelines for eating, supplements, etc. In addition to my Omega-3 regimen, she suggested extra calcium and magnesium (magnesium is something that can apparently help fibromyalgia). I upped my supplementation of those minerals (using Trader Joe's "calcium, magnesium, and zinc" supplement) and have been pain-free for 48 hours. This is amazing, considering that winter is the most difficult time for me, healthwise. She also recommended drinking at least two cups of very strong green tea (brewed until it's bitter, which brings out all the antioxidants), and upping my exercise to at least 3 thirty-minute walks a week. The hardest part for me was that she asked me to get rid of my scale! It was very hard to put it in the hall closet (I am not yet at the point where I can dump it)--but I find that I feel a lot better about myself now that it's gone. She told me that weight isn't always an indicator of health, and I felt really happy to hear that. I had told her that I find myself craving sugar before bedtime, so my new "suggestion" from her is to put between two and three hours between my last meal and bedtime, and eat veggies if I crave something after dinner (I am gradually reducing my intake of white sugar and refined flour, too). My goal is to get healthier; if I lose weight in the process, that's also great. After a few days of following these suggestions, I have a lot more energy and I sleep better at night.

So, hopefully I will end 2006 in radiant good health, or at least approaching that!

Happy Soggy New Year!

The power was out here in our little neck of the woods for 24 hours, due to one heck of a storm. We had to get out the kerosene lamps (I have two) and many candles, and Mr. Strega taught me to play gin rummy (I won 2 games). There has been a lot of local flooding, rivers and ponds rising, and overall drippiness, but nothing compared to the folks up in the Napa area (and this is all a drop compared to Hurricane Katrina). Mr. Strega and I fell asleep early, so we missed the New Year moment (no way to watch the ball drop on Times Square anyway, though the local bar, Monty's Log Cabin, hoists a big lit-up white ball onto a flagpole covered in Christmas lights, and apparently drops the ball at the crucial moment, with all the clientele gathered in the yard. Monty's is near the Felton Bigfoot Museum, and the clientele seem to intermingle, so we don't go there, not even to watch the ball drop). I woke up around four a.m., got up, lit the two kerosene lamps, did my Morning Pages, and then put batteries in my purple Itty Bitty Book Light and read MFK Fisher until I finally fell asleep again. I get very restless during storms--don't know why.

It is a new year, ableit soggy, and my only resolution today is to be kinder to myself and others--and maybe find my way back to poetry again. That is one of the reasons I started the Morning Pages again (I go on and off The Artist's Way, and am at a point of "take what you like and leave the rest," but am hoping that just writing like this in the morning will open the well again). Other writers I know have been very kind about pointing out the fact that I am writing a fairly big book (now estimated at 375 pages) of occasionally really difficult subject matter--but the hardest part for me is not feeling like a poet anymore. That is a very hard quality to describe, and I do know that it's a quality that hasn't died in me (I feel glimmers of it occasionally), but is just quieter than I want.

Still, I wish all my faithful readers a happy, healthy, prosperous, abundant New Year in which all our dreams and wishes come true. And that's my two cents' worth today.