Friday, September 14, 2007

The Myth About Facts

It's an interesting paradox that in a culture hooked on the value of fact over fiction, there's a tendency not to allow certain facts to get in the way of a nice juicy story, especially if it involves a scapegoat to get everyone else off the hook.

This morning the Guardian prints an article by Suzanne Goldenberg reporting that James Frey is now to publish a novel as a novel, and not (as with his previous book) as a memoir. Not so long ago, the very same paper published a long profile of James Frey by Laura Barton, in which Frey claimed that he had never intended his first book as a memoir, but was pressured by publisher responses to sell it as such. Many authors would have recognized from personal experience - as indeed did the Bitch - a situation which is becoming all too familiar. After I wrote about it, an agent commented thus on my post:
As an agent, I feel quite strongly that Frey was shafted by his publisher and agent. Not only must they have known that embellishment was going on, they *did* know - I met an editor at Doubleday who told me, prior to the book's Oprah laurels, that he was sure some of the book wasn't true. It is deeply disingenuous of the professionals closely involved in the book's publication to claim they were duped by Frey, ruthless of them to drop him, and deeply immoral for them to continue to profit from the discredited works which they are merrily doing.
Yet this statement and Frey's Guardian claim are still apparently out of the equation, and the assumption that Frey simply and deceitfully duped his publishers, as well as the public, persists. Today's Guardian article replicates that version wholesale, damningly referring to 'his deceptions'. Goldenberg makes much of the fact that Frey made personal apologies on both the Oprah Winfrey show and in a new edition of the book, but to take that at face value is to show a monumental naivite, and to underestimate the vulnerability and powerlessness of authors. James Frey would not be the first author to be forced to issue a public apology for something for which he/she was not solely responsible - the Bitch is one, for a start, and her publisher was nothing like as powerful as Frey's - and to comply out of sheer dread of being dropped.

Funny how, in a world hooked on facts, some of the facts seem too slippery to hold. Seems then they need to be stated over and over again.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Maybe, baby (& I love your blog)

Maybe the blame should have been shared more.

But my annoyance remains.

I loathed Frey's book on first reading - but gave it huge (private) dispensation for its apparent factual authenticity.

And when Frey says: Things were changed for all sorts of reasons: effect, for respect, other people's anonymity, making the story function properly...his statement is still only a partial "truth".

Every fact change was to make his ordeal seem objectively worse and his recovery more admirable.

None of them "functioned" in the other direction.

That's why I still think he's a toad.

Elizabeth Baines said...

Mm. I'm not convinced, though, that we don't read novels differently (you read it as fact) and apply different moral judgements to both fictional characters and their authors. This is why I am dead against the biographical approach to fiction ('how autobiographical is this?') and feel we need a greater separation between novels and their authors than we allow at present.

SusanHill said...

The novel is a text and the text stands alone from the moment the umbilical cord is cut from the author - i.e. when it`s finished. The author is entirely irrelevant, as is their life, how much of the novel is 'true' - everything. Derrida was right. Post modernism is right. But if a book calls itself an autobiography or a memoir then it is different, the author is not irrelevant - though fact has obviously been distilled through them, changed by their perception etc.
I know of the case of a UK author who got away with murder when writing what he called a memoir (and a misery one) when 80% of it was made-up. He took in everyone - everyone, that is, bar his siblings. They knew. But whereas Frey was exposed, this guy has conned most people.

Anonymous said...

Totally agree with "biographism" as a ghastly way to read fiction...(and I suspect I'm slightly unhinged on the subject of Frey anyway!)

Elizabeth Baines said...

Susan: This is why, against the current trend, I'm not such a fan of memoir (and champion fiction above it). Though it seems to me anyway that we need a different view of memoirs: we should stop seeing them as incontrovertible fact and understand that they are, as you say, one person's filtering of their own experience - which inevitably involves distortion, wishful thinking , etc - in other words, fictionalization.

I'm still uneasy with your use of the word 'exposed' for Frey, which implies his wilful deceit. As I say above, we need to take into account his claim that he never wanted to publish his book as a memoir in the first place, but felt coerced by the contemporary memoir-mad market.