I am unreasonably fascinated by James Frey and what he means in the age of information. <\/p>\n
In case you’ve been under a rock for the past month or so, Frey’s Million Little Pieces<\/span>, 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n Frey has gotten a lot of ink since The Smoking Gun’s exposé, The New York Times<\/span> 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.<\/p>\n I’ve seen articles about Frey or about Frey’s influence in Slate<\/a>, Salon<\/span>, The Washington Post<\/a>, and Mark Morford’s<\/a> column. The comics page<\/a> 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<\/a>, his assumptions about addiction and recovery and how the lies he told affect people’s perceptions of those things.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The essence of nostalgia, in fact, is the adding of sugar to the past to make it go down more smoothly. Happy Days<\/span> and Grease<\/span> 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<\/span> 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> being the exemplar), as are the cautions from career counselors on what the impact of having a blog<\/a> can be on your potential for getting a new job in the day and age of Google caching.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n