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Friday, January 27, 2006

Complacencies of the Memoir

From Newsday:

Charlotte Abbott covers the industry for Publishers Weekly: "The reaction I've been getting over the last few days is 'plus ça change,'" she says of her conversations with publishing insiders. "'There's a long list of memoirists that turn out to be fabulists, and that's the risk we take. It'll blow over.' I've heard that from old-timers who've been around for 25 years and over the long-term haven't seen things change."

But Abbott is quick to point out that the Internet has ushered in an "age of transparency," where anyone with a modem can set himself up as an amateur fact-checker. Though practices vary from house to house, most books undergo a legal review - to address libel concerns - but not a comprehensive check for accuracy. Lorin Stein, an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, describes an editorial process that probably sounds familiar to most of his colleagues: "If it sounds like a tall tale, you write in the margin, 'Really?'" After that, it's up to the author to respond.

"It remains to be seen if the complacency of the industry will be shaken," Abbott says. "If the beat moves on, this just becomes an academic essay topic."


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"I don't think it's so terrible," says [Vivian] Gornick, referring to Frey. "After all, he has compelled all these people to come along with him."

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' I recently finished a Masters in Fine Arts degree in Creative Nonfiction, and those of us who graduated in the class of 2005 remember our very own Oprah/James Frey moment, only the players happened to be Vivian Gornick and a bunch of MFA students, about half of whom were journalists, half memoirists. The story is detailed here in Salon, by Terry Greene Sterling, a classmate who just happened to have a connection with Salon and sold them a story the very next day. You can find the story recapped in yesterday's New York Newsday. The scene goes like this:

Gornick is giving a riveting, thoughful lecture. She's obviously taken the time to prepare for what is a very well read and engaged audience. She also reads several passages from her book, Fierce Attachments. Gornick winds up and opens the floor for questions, at which point a student asks, I believe, if I remember this correctly (and that's the thing about memory), how she remembered all that dialogue from when she was a teenager. At which point, Gornick began telling us of all the embellishments, and even made up scenes. I was, to say the least, feeling betrayed. I had loved the book. I had loved it because it had certain "truth is stranger than fiction" moments. There were plenty others who felt the same, including professor Walt Harrington, who was a former Washington Post reporter, and Tom French, who still works at the St. Petersburgh Times and has one Pulitzer under his belt. The students and Harrington went after Gornick, and I can only compare it to Frey's confessional today on Oprah--it was too painful to watch, made everyone in the room (and there were 50 of us) squirm or made us angry, or both. I relived it today watching the first five minutes of Oprah.

The Gornick incident, as it has come to be known, tainted our class and our two years of grad school with a near perpetual discussion of "what is truth?" Is it emotional truth? Actual truth? And whose truth is it? '


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Non-Complacencies of the Memoir



'So the question arises: How did he get away with it? It is true, as was pointed out on "Oprah," that fact checking at book publishers is close to non-existent. But Frey devised one whopper after another and, for a long time, either escaped detection or was able to swat away those crying foul. Sitting in a TV studio and watching him slowly concede some of his lies under Oprah’s third degree -- I'm not convinced he has yet fessed up to all of them -- was alternately excruciating and satisfying but hardly fun. The issues raised by this episode, both in book publishing and the culture at large, are big ones and they are not going to go away.'


Frank Rich, NYTimes