The big literary topic in the news the past week, of course, has been the revelation that James Frey's gazillion-selling memoir A Million Little Pieces is mostly a pack of lies.
Frey's apologists, including Oprah Winfrey, have argued that this is "much ado about nothing" and that the book is "emotionally [true]" (whatever the hell that means). We are told that memoirs are expected to be fabricated, so it's no big deal.
Such defenses, impassioned and even well-intentioned though they may be, are misguided, if not downright dangerous.
There is a general expectation when reading memoirs that, although some details may be misremembered, and some events may be interpreted differently, and that recollections of varying parties will always vary, there is nonetheless a commitment to truth and accuracy that don't depend on subjective perspectives.
If I have a fight with my wife, which of us started it might be a legitimate matter of differing memories. If a pair of songwriters collaborate on a song, they might each remember differently whose the initial spark of inspiration was. If a drunk is on a bender and wakes up covered in vomit in the back of a police car, whether or not that happened in 1993 or 1994 isn't really that important.
However, whether or not a person went to jail, or whether or not they contributed to the deaths of two people, or whether or not they were an FBI informant, are not matters of interpretation or subjective memory. They either happened or they didn't. If you report in an allegedly truthful recounting of your life that they happened when really they did not, then you're a liar and the entire work is suspect.
A few errors here and there are to be expected in a work of autobiography. Inconsistencies on minor details are excusable. Even an attempt to exaggerate one's own importance, or to enhance one's reputation, is natural. But a repeated, deliberate and consistent pattern of fabrication exposes the work to be either fiction or fraud -- and certainly not worthy of this kind of attention.
As readers and consumers, we have to rely, at least to some reasonable extent, on the reputation of a company like Random House to vet the manuscripts they sell under the banner of non-fiction. That's not to say that we have an expectation of 100% accuracy. But if, on balance, a story is more not true than it is true, it is deceitful to publish it as non-fiction. We call such works novels and they should be published and marketed as such.
So, does this even matter? As a former historian, I think it matters a lot. The general public already has a hard enough time differentiating between truth and fiction. The difference between gossip and news is already a shaky concept for too many people. Our collective knowledge of history and our understanding of what did and what did not happen is abysmally poor. And that's a problem.
Sure, most academics and critics and publishing professionals are no doubt savvy enough to realize that a book like Frey's contains, at the least, gross exaggerations. But is the average TV viewer who reads the book based on talk show host's recommendation sophisticated enough? Is a high school kid who picks up the book in the library hip to what Frey is doing?
If it's acceptable to write a book about your life that's full of lies, maybe in and of itself that's not important. But what effect does that have on the public's overall confidence in the truth of what they read? If a non-fiction memoir published by Random House can't be relied upon to be at least reasonably accurate, how can we believe their history books, their biographies or their science monographs?
Even in the field of memoir, there is a reasonable presumption of accuracy, or else the book is worthless as an autobiography. If A Million Little Pieces is no more truthful than The Hitler Diaries, then it should be treated as such.
