Copywrite

Almost everyone who has written fiction with any sort of dedication has had the fantasy. You hold the book in your hand. The dust jacket crinkles a bit as you weight the volume by the spine and find that it is heavier than you imagined it would be. You don’t quite register your name on the cover but there it is just the same.

You open it and the spine creaks just a bit in that special way that only a brand new book can. The paper is heavy, at least 24lb bond as you flip passed the mandatory blank page, the frontispiece that in previous eras would have held an engraving because there was no four-color photo on the dust jacket.

You turn the title page to the dedication and yes, there is the list you slaved over, you considered so carefully – should you list your mother first or your girlfriend; will that creative writing teacher who was so important to you even remember that you took her class?

And in this fantasy as you hold this book in your hand you imagine sending it to all the people you want to share your joy with and to all the people who told you that you shouldn’t bother to write another word just so you’ll have the deep, abiding pleasure of knowing that they know that you proved them wrong. Sometimes in this fantasy your name is foil embossed on the dust jacket instead of just printed.

I have this fantasy periodically and I now realize that I’ve been going about it all wrong. Instead of writing fiction what I need to do is write fiction that is plausible as memoir, sell it as such, and then recant publicly, preferably on Oprah, or perhaps in The New York Times.

Sarah McGrath, the editor at Riverhead who worked with Ms. Seltzer for three years on the book, said she was stunned to discover that the author had lied.

“It’s very upsetting to us because we spent so much time with this person and we felt such sympathy for her and she would talk about how she didn’t have any money or any heat and we completely bought into that and thought we were doing something good by bringing her story to light,” Ms. McGrath said.

“There’s a huge personal betrayal here as well as a professional one,” she said.

It sort of makes me wonder, does McGrath not realize that she, too, is responsible for a professional betrayal? Just what obligation does a book publishing company have to the book-buying public? More to the point, when did all media become unreliable?

I ceased to believe anything I saw on television over a decade ago. At the time I was working in a video post production house, you know, the kind where they cut together commercials – “Act fast and will throw in a bonus CD for only $1.99!” – and other more highbrow fare. Most of it, though, was corporate videos, those boring, brutish things you often have to sit through at the company retreat, the ones that make you wonder how much fatter your check would have been had they not blown all that money on the 15 minute corporate video.

It was during an editing session for one of these where I stopped believing my eyes, at least with respect to anything I saw on a television screen: we made the Senior Vice President taller and thinner. Yes, right there in the effects box we added at least three inches to the top and took as many off the sides of a pudgy, balding little executive.

It used to be that you could trust what you saw in print. Yes, journalism is never truly objective but you had some semblance of security that you were at least getting objective facts – a man was robbed, someone held a press conference – about an event if not about what the event means. And it used to be that you could trust your books. You took biographies with a grain of salt as they were often written by someone with an ulterior motive whether that motive be laudatory or disparaging.

Fiction was fiction and it was labeled as such. None of this James Frey, JT LeRoy, Margaret Seltzer bullshit. Thirty years ago no one would have dreamed of faking a holocaust memoir in which she claimed to have lived with wolves – actual wolves not metaphorical ones – after her parents were killed by the Nazis.

More, what does it say about us that fiction writers have to struggle to get published, that journals like McSweeney’s are publishing authors like Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates who have absolutely no need for a hand up yet fiction, interesting, evolved fiction is having to pass itself off as “true story” material?