[Mb-civic] 'My Sorry Life' (well, sort of) - Ellen Goodman - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  'My Sorry Life' (well, sort of)

By Ellen Goodman  |  January 20, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

THE HEADLINE WRITERS got the most out of this brouhaha. After James 
Frey's memoir of self-destruction and redemption, ''A Million Little 
Pieces," was riddled with buckshot from the Smoking Gun website, they 
got to work: ''A Million Little Lies." ''Truth, the Whole Truth and 
Memoirs." ''Prose and Cons." ''Too Bad to Be True."

It turns out that the ''gut-wrenching memoir" that Oprah loved and that 
sold 3.5 million copies was made of whole cloth as well as whole life. 
Frey did five hours in custody, not three months in jail. He didn't mix 
it up with the police officers, and he barely knew the girl who died in 
a train accident for which he said he was blamed. And that's the beginning.

The defabrication set off the debate on truth and virtual truth, reality 
and essential reality, fiction and nonfiction that pits certified 
members of the ''reality-based community" against the 
post-modern-recontructionist-abstract-expressionist-who-knows-what 
school of literati.

On the one hand are journalists, notoriously nitpicky souls who believe 
that if you write about something that happened, dear me, it should have 
actually happened. On the other hand, there's Oprah defending the 
''underlying message of redemption" no matter how much hooey it lay 
under. There's also a lit-crit type saying that an author, like a 
painter, is ''free to choose a self-portrait style that may be 
representational or . . . abstract." And publisher Nan Talese sighs that 
''we are not talking about weapons of mass destruction."

Meanwhile, Frey punches back at the ''latest attempt to discredit me," 
says the book is 95 percent pure, and who cares about the other 5 
percent anyway.

Well, I care whether Frey actually had a root canal without Novocain -- 
puhleeze. But I also want to know how we got to the moment where a (bad) 
writer like Frey lies to make himself and his life so much worse than it 
was. So much down and dirtier, so much ugly and uglier, than reality. 
It's a reverse Narcissus, an upside-down braggart.

Wasn't memoir once the specialty of the gentry who wanted to spend their 
dotage telling the world how they reached the pole, won the war, saved 
the empire? By themselves. Today, true somebodies avoid true 
confessions. But the literature of nobodies is populated by publicized 
struggles with drugs, incest, depression, obesity, abuse, shoplifting, 
gambling -- the authors digging pits deep enough from which to redeem 
themselves.

''I am an alcoholic and I am a drug addict and I am a criminal," wrote 
Frey eight times. Do bad-guy memoirists now hype up their records for 
street cred and sales, like a middle-class hip-hopper doing gangsta rap?

The genre of celebrity books has long had a requisite chapter on rehab. 
Even benign magazines like Jane have a regular feature called ''It 
Happened to Me" -- and what happened better be bad. Confessions have 
been ratcheted up and over-the-top until weight-loss memoirs include 
lard-eating binges.

The point of a narrative is to hit bottom, and bottom is getting lower 
all the time. The point of hitting bottom is redemption and being 
welcomed into the knighthood of survivors.

In Elie Wiesel's latest novel, ''The Time of the Uprooted," one 
character laments the strange competition for the title of survivor: 
''Everybody wanted to be one. No need to have undergone a selection at 
Birkenau or the tortures of Treblinka . . . if everyone is a potential 
or virtual survivor, then no one is a true survivor."

This brings us to one of the sorriest side effects of fabrications and 
their justification. In one of those odd turns of fate, the new Oprah 
pick is ''Night," the devastating story of Wiesel's adolescence in a 
concentration camp.

''Night" has been labeled both an autobiographical novel and a memoir. 
But ''Night," written by the man who has borne witness to the Holocaust 
for 60 years, is the gold standard of memoirs in the sense of ''memory," 
a narrative that edits life without fabricating it. In short, it's true. 
Have Frey and his ''virtual truth" supporters cheapened that distinction?

Where does all this slippery thinking take us? The morphing of truth and 
fiction promotes a world in which facts are ''subjective" and reality 
''flexible." It feeds an indifference to honesty and a belief that every 
truth is up for grabs. At its most extreme it lends credibility -- 
street cred -- to such frauds as the Holocaust denial.

Did you notice that the new president of Iran calls the Holocaust a 
''myth"? Someday we'll read about it -- in his memoirs.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/01/20/my_sorry_life_well_sort_of/
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