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.