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.