I am unreasonably fascinated by James Frey and what he means in the age of information.
In case you’ve been under a rock for the past month or so, Frey’s Million Little Pieces, which I had never heard of before the scandal about his book broke, sold as a memoir and picked by Oprah as part of her market changing book club was revealed by The Smoking Gun to be, in larger part, fabricated. Not a memoir in truth but, instead, a version of Frey’s life dressed up with some strategically fictionalized events.
Frey has gotten a lot of ink since The Smoking Gun’s exposé, The New York Times search page lists 97 articles in the past 90 days that reference “James Frey.” Plugging his name into Google news yields an ungodly high number of results but I think that has more to do with a certain lack of specificity in how Google indexes news than it does with Frey’s actual importance.
I’ve seen articles about Frey or about Frey’s influence in Slate, Salon, The Washington Post, and Mark Morford’s column. The comics page has even gotten into the act. A lot of journalists have spent a lot of ink on excoriating Frey for his lies and the damage they may have done to the “culture of recovery” (may I gag now?). And while I didn’t see the whole interview, I suspect that’s one of the things that Oprah challenged Frey on during his command performance, his assumptions about addiction and recovery and how the lies he told affect people’s perceptions of those things.
What interests me is not those things but more the ink that has been spent on examining the nature of memoir versus fiction. The Washington Post claims that memoir has been replacing fiction for the last decade. I would argue that there never was such a thing as a true memoir.
Memory, by nature, distorts. Time, emotional distance, wishful thinking, all of these things color and shape past events to the point that unless there is an uncontrovertible visual and aural record for an event memories are whittled and polished to where we can be comfortable with them and how they fit into the story of our lives that we are telling at any given moment. Don’t think so? Then explain to me, please, why anyone ever goes to a high school reunion.
The essence of nostalgia, in fact, is the adding of sugar to the past to make it go down more smoothly. Happy Days and Grease digested the 1950s for us to turn out something palatable and happy which ignored all the pressures to conform and racial and economic tensions of the era. The Wonder Years did the same thing for the 1960s. We have yet to successfully turn the Reagan era into something that can ignore the advent of AIDS and massive economic upheaval. And I’m sort of ambivalent about living long enough to see popular culture sanitize the chaos of W’s presidency.
More than the effects of nostalgia, though, I’d argue that there is no true memoir because the story of our lives changes constantly to fit the way we see ourselves and how we want others to see us. In short, the story we tell about ourselves changes because we change and that, in turn, changes how we perceive our pasts.
Memoir takes on a whole new concept in the age of blogs. Anyone who has one of these things struggles with just how much to say, how honest to be, given that they are available to anyone with an internet connection. Indeed, the stories of people being fired over the content of their blogs are numerous (this being the exemplar), as are the cautions from career counselors on what the impact of having a blog can be on your potential for getting a new job in the day and age of Google caching.
It’s not just blogs, though, that pose problems for creating the story of our lives. I personally know someone who managed to destroy what was left of her marriage by confessing to an affair with her boss and subsequent abortion in the context of a discussion of an article about Roe v. Wade on a news magazine’s web site. Try shifting yourself image with that hanging around in the vastness of the internet.
Blogs, discussion forums, e-mail, IM logs, all of these things combine to give us the impression that we’re being watched (apparently we are), and as we all know an event that is being watched is changed by the very fact that it is being observed.
Or, to put it another way, who isn’t on her best behavior, isn’t trying to put the best version of herself forward, when she knows she’s on stage?
If identity is mutable, as Madison Avenue tries to tell us with each new look, fashion trend, or dubbing of [insert color here] is “the new black,” is it reasonable for any memoir to reflect the pure, 100% truth about someone? Granted, Frey’s lies were more than the simple distortions of memory; indeed, they were a sad little man trying to craft a self-image out of shreds of experience. But, as is often the case with things gone awry, he has provoked some very interesting questions.
Well said. I started blogging in November of last year and thought how great it would be to “not know” who was listening. I thought this would allow me to say whatever I want on my blog. Well, guess what, other bloggers and I got to know each other (albeit, I don’t know their names or what they look like) and I am no longer anonymous. I’m on stage, feeling the pressure to write something interesting. I’m bummed when no one comments on my latest submission. Are we all so immature that every action is a cry for attention?
My – you hit on a wide range of topics here. Regarding memoirs/autobiographies and reality there are a bunch of factors. I have, for example, about 30 years of journals. I keep them precisely so I can ‘remember’ events. Look them up would be more accurate. My friends find this irritating – because I am always right in a discussion of this sort. At least after I refer to the journals. At about yearly intervals I read through large portions of these journals – and so a lot of the material recorded there stays somewhat fresh in my mind, and the ordinary processes and failures of memory are pretty much negated. Yet each time I read through, it all looks different – I find myself thinking, “Was it really like that?” But in general, an important issue is whether or not an author has such material to rely on and to make her work more reliable – or not. If not – well – whew.
But I’ve been fascinated by the changes that happen even beyond the obvious ones resulting from egotism, personal and or family bias, and such. For example, I lived in Boston my first year out of college. (Actually that itself is an example of smoothing down the edges, since I really lived in Charlestown, but I wrote Boston because readers are more likely to know of Boston than Charlestown, and, as you will see, it doesn’t change the story.) Anyhow – in my memory, Boston Common is a rather square park – I walked through it a lot as a pleasant shortcut when I lived there. I was surprised several years ago when I saw a map of the Common and it wasn’t square at all. But my memory had regularized it from its quite irregular shape. And I think that’s actually one of the functions of the mind – or brain or something. It’s a pattern-finder – and it fits raw data into patterns, regularizing the data, making it more symmetrical – either visually or conceptually or…..This is pretty much a global function – everything that gets remembered at all is affected by this process. And, as I said, that’s before we take into account all the shifting caused by personal interest.
Then there’s the natural process of story telling. That’s what autobiography and memoir-writing are I think. People obviously don’t tell reality – that’s just a sort of information dump that is chaotic and near meaningless. Some sort of order has to be imposed on the raw data, so to speak. Usually it’s the order of ‘what this meant to me’ – sometimes it’s ‘what this meant in terms of history’ – but in any case, a lot of material is dropped, and what’s left is patted nicely into some recognizable shape.
Cultural factors are important too – in some cultures, people train themselves to remember almost perfectly certain sets of facts which are valued very highly. Family genealogies, group history, personal stories of revered individuals, spiritual teachings – all can come under this heading. All of them may also be shaped by distinct conventions – and so become a mixture of extremely reliable recordings of facts put into conventional formats. The accuracy of some of this sort of material has been well validated. In our literate culture, however, this sort of remembering has been lost.
But – but – none of this in any way excuses deliberate fiction presented as truth, as how it really happened. That’s called lying.
Hello..You do know don’t you, that you are AMAZING!
I’m printing this so I can reflect.
STB
Hmm. You raise some very thought-provoking and interesting questions here. I agree with you that memory distorts, and that we do tend to want to present ourselves in certain lights. It’s also pretty clear that our lives are not some static, unchanging story that we tell the same way at 30 as we do at 80. (God, I’d hope not … I like to think that we as humans do grow and change over the course of our lifetimes.) However, I don’t know that I’d say there is no such thing as a true memoir because of those factors. The core elements of a person’s life story are the same, regardless of how the perceptions change … and it’s the as-accurate-as-possible reporting of those elements that makes memoir true. We do forget details over time, and we do perceive things differently as time passes … but that’s not deliberate misrepresentation of events. For example … if I were to write a memoir (God forbid) … I would recall that I cried at the drop of a hat when I was a teenager. If I wrote the memoir at 25, I would remember specific instances of why I was crying, and would be inclined to think it was a wonderful personality trait, meaning that I was sensitive. If I wrote the memoir now, at almost 38, I wouldn’t recall many specific instances, nor would I think that being such a soft touch was a good thing. But that basic fact of my life story doesn’t change because my perceptions of it do. I think that’s what makes the difference. Then again, I’m not a literary type … so what the hell do I know? At any rate, thanks for making me think … and for letting me ramble on and on.