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Friday, January 13, 2006
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The Trials of James Frey Where to start with Patti Davis’s defense of James Frey in Newsweek? Start with her title: WRITER ON TRIAL. Writer on trial is Orhan Pamuk, brought up on charges for writing the truth about Turkish history. Writer on trial was Osip Mandelstam, arrested and imprisoned by the secret police for a poem. Writer on trial is not rich happy redeemed James Frey, script writer, Picasso collector, self-mythologizer. And writer on trial is certainly not Patti Davis, though she characterizes herself in the essay as a kind of Nadezhda Mandelstam, Frey’s fellow writer and sufferer: “James Frey’s writing is under attack. I know how he feels.” She knows how he feels not merely because people ridiculed her writing (she only got published because she was the President’s daughter, etc.) but also because she’s a recovered addict too, and you can’t write this stuff, or recognize true descriptions of this stuff, unless you’ve been there: I was in awe of the book as a writer, and grateful for it as a recovered drug addict. He had the guts to tell you how dark it gets down there and how it’s like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride when your brain spins out on crazy hairpin turns and you can’t find the road back. Or any road at all. He didn’t sugarcoat the rage or the pain or the awful loneliness. The truths he told weren’t easy to read and they certainly weren’t pretty. But they were truths. No one could have made up what he wrote. You have to have taken that long dark fall. You have to have known the madness of trying to pull yourself out, but then maybe not wanting to because in a lot of ways you like it down there. Davis here shows a remarkable lack of faith in fiction writing. Of course you don’t have to have been there, and of course having been there doesn’t automatically confer credibility and power upon what you say about what it was like. In fact sometimes a first-rate writer who hasn’t been there can do a better job than a less than first-rate writer who has. Note Davis’s own trite language - crazy hairpin turns, awful loneliness, long dark fall. She’s been there, but she can’t write convincingly about it. (For another ex-addict's more plausible take on Frey, here's Seth Mnookin, in Slate.) Davis’s therapeutic mentality only allows her to conceive of Frey’s writing as an emanation of the pain all of us share by virtue of being human. Because motives like literary ambition, attention getting, competitiveness, and the like, have no place in her mental world, she’s incapable of thinking clearly about what Frey and his book actually represent. All she can do is feel: But the one moment that broke my heart was when he said he’s never going to write about himself again. I knew in that instant how wounded he is by all that’s happened. Don’t say that, I whispered to myself. Even though I understood. …I don’t care how many days Frey did or did not spend in jail. I care that he keeps writing with a heart that doesn’t hold back. Soppy, self-aggrandizing emotivism of this sort gives women - whether they write or not - a bad name. As Maureen Dowd writes in this morning's New York Times, "[W]e no longer have a society especially consecrated to truth. The culture produces an infinity of TV shows and movies depicting the importance of honesty. But they're really talking only about the importance of being honest about your feelings. Sharing feelings is not the same thing as telling the truth. We've become a country of situationalists." |