Literary Fraud Month
Jan. 11th, 2006 02:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
naomikritzerJohn Scalzi declared January to be National Literary Fraud month, in honor of James Frey and JT Leroy.
This got me thinking about a comment a friend of mine made back in high school. "I want to write my unauthorized autobiography," he said. "Because I could make up all kinds of shit and it would be okay! It's unauthorized!"
I remember when A Million Little Pieces came out; much of it is set in Minnesota, so there was some extra local coverage. The dentists' association and Hazeldon both said that the root canal scene (in which Frey undergoes several root canals with no anaesthesia of any kind) was BS. I am not an expert on 12 Step programs, but I find it really hard to believe that they would make someone get dental work done without anaesthesia. I can believe a ban on Vicodin (and from what I understand, most people take painkillers for a day or two after a root canal) but it's not like someone is going to get buzzed and start using novocaine recreationally. I could believe the following scenario: Frey was not allowed to have sedation, Vicodin, laughing gas, or any of the other take-the-edge-off cocktails that some dentists will offer when you're having major dental work done. All he got was novocaine. And he's someone for whom novocaine does not work well, so he felt quite a lot more pain from the procedure than is ideal. And he was either stoic about it, or he had a sadistic dentist, so they didn't deal with this problem by stopping and giving him more novocaine.
(Novocaine works as advertised for me: if you inject it into me, the relevent bit goes numb. Ed says that novocaine does absolutely nothing for him. I have been told by experts on this that some people require a lot more novocaine than others, and that if you've had bad results from novocaine in the past but require dental work, you should simply tell the dentist this, because they can give you more. You should not feel any pain during dental work, and if you do, your dentist screwed up.)
Anyway, Frey told the story as, "Because I was in treatment for addiction, they said, NO PAIN MEDS OR ANAESTHETIC AT ALL. I had to just sit still and let them drill." And this was questioned at the time.
An airline (Northwest, probably) also challenged his account, saying that no way in hell would they let some guy board while drunk and covered in blood. I haven't read the book, so I don't know when it takes place. I think a blood-covered drunk man would have been rather more likely to get on before 9/11, but post 9/11, no way.
The JT Leroy story is actually more interesting to me. JT Leroy may turn out not to exist at all. Now, there's actually an highly honorable tradition in my genre of writing under an assumed persona. But to my knowledge, James Tiptree, Jr. wrote science fiction, not memoir or thinly disguised memoir.
In principle, I think that a book should stand on its own -- it shouldn't rely on the hair-raising autobiography of its author in order to be worthy of reading. I haven't read Leroy's novels so I don't know to what extent they do -- but given that the apparent real authors made up an entire fictional person and went so far as hiring someone to be a stand-in, well, that's not a good sign.
Back in the 1990s it came out that the book The Education of Little Tree had been written by Asa Carter. This is another book I haven't read, though I remember it being popular and passed around a bit in the 1980s. It's about a Native American boy and was also originally marketed as memoir, though after the unveiling of the author, they re-branded it as fiction. What's particularly appalling in this case was that Carter was an open racist, the speechwriter who penned the phrase, "Segregation now -- segregation tomorrow -- segregation forever!" for George Wallace.
I read a lot of what I call "occupational memoirs" -- non-fiction books by interesting people who write about their jobs. I've read books by nurses and doctors, by the lawyer who represented the Menendez brothers, by FBI profiler John Douglas, by a firefighter (fans of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
scott_lynch's firefighter stories might like this one: it's called Working Fire and was written by Zac Unger), by a tax collector (that one sucked, alas), by a health researcher who studied the lives of Nevada prostitutes (that one rocked, I highly recommend it to the curious -- it's called Brothel.) Very recently I read Garlic and Sapphires by the former NYT restaurant reviewer, Ruth Reichl, and War Reporting for Cowards by Chris Ayres, both of which were excellent.
Authenticity is critical in books like this. Coincidences that are amazing and awe-inspiring in real life become eye-roll-inspiring dei ex machina in fiction. Truth is stranger than fiction because truth can be stranger than fiction -- fiction is required to be believable, and reality is under no such obligation. Our hunger for strange stories about reality can be seen in every debunked-by-Snopes urban legend that continues to make the rounds (really! it happened to my cousin's friend!) and the continued strong sales of memoirs.
There are legitimate ways to mix fact and fantasy, but serving fiction as straight-up memoir isn't one of them, and hiring a stand-in to run around as the pretend author because otherwise everyone would view your book as complete and utter tripe isn't, either.
Should I ever write a memoir (unlikely, since I haven't led a particularly exciting life), I will take my cue from my long ago friend and call it my Unauthorized Autobiography. Problem solved.
Edited to change "deus ex machinas" to "dei ex machina" as per my live-in Latin expert. Well, live-in person-who-took-Latin-in-high-school, anyway.
This got me thinking about a comment a friend of mine made back in high school. "I want to write my unauthorized autobiography," he said. "Because I could make up all kinds of shit and it would be okay! It's unauthorized!"
I remember when A Million Little Pieces came out; much of it is set in Minnesota, so there was some extra local coverage. The dentists' association and Hazeldon both said that the root canal scene (in which Frey undergoes several root canals with no anaesthesia of any kind) was BS. I am not an expert on 12 Step programs, but I find it really hard to believe that they would make someone get dental work done without anaesthesia. I can believe a ban on Vicodin (and from what I understand, most people take painkillers for a day or two after a root canal) but it's not like someone is going to get buzzed and start using novocaine recreationally. I could believe the following scenario: Frey was not allowed to have sedation, Vicodin, laughing gas, or any of the other take-the-edge-off cocktails that some dentists will offer when you're having major dental work done. All he got was novocaine. And he's someone for whom novocaine does not work well, so he felt quite a lot more pain from the procedure than is ideal. And he was either stoic about it, or he had a sadistic dentist, so they didn't deal with this problem by stopping and giving him more novocaine.
(Novocaine works as advertised for me: if you inject it into me, the relevent bit goes numb. Ed says that novocaine does absolutely nothing for him. I have been told by experts on this that some people require a lot more novocaine than others, and that if you've had bad results from novocaine in the past but require dental work, you should simply tell the dentist this, because they can give you more. You should not feel any pain during dental work, and if you do, your dentist screwed up.)
Anyway, Frey told the story as, "Because I was in treatment for addiction, they said, NO PAIN MEDS OR ANAESTHETIC AT ALL. I had to just sit still and let them drill." And this was questioned at the time.
An airline (Northwest, probably) also challenged his account, saying that no way in hell would they let some guy board while drunk and covered in blood. I haven't read the book, so I don't know when it takes place. I think a blood-covered drunk man would have been rather more likely to get on before 9/11, but post 9/11, no way.
The JT Leroy story is actually more interesting to me. JT Leroy may turn out not to exist at all. Now, there's actually an highly honorable tradition in my genre of writing under an assumed persona. But to my knowledge, James Tiptree, Jr. wrote science fiction, not memoir or thinly disguised memoir.
In principle, I think that a book should stand on its own -- it shouldn't rely on the hair-raising autobiography of its author in order to be worthy of reading. I haven't read Leroy's novels so I don't know to what extent they do -- but given that the apparent real authors made up an entire fictional person and went so far as hiring someone to be a stand-in, well, that's not a good sign.
Back in the 1990s it came out that the book The Education of Little Tree had been written by Asa Carter. This is another book I haven't read, though I remember it being popular and passed around a bit in the 1980s. It's about a Native American boy and was also originally marketed as memoir, though after the unveiling of the author, they re-branded it as fiction. What's particularly appalling in this case was that Carter was an open racist, the speechwriter who penned the phrase, "Segregation now -- segregation tomorrow -- segregation forever!" for George Wallace.
I read a lot of what I call "occupational memoirs" -- non-fiction books by interesting people who write about their jobs. I've read books by nurses and doctors, by the lawyer who represented the Menendez brothers, by FBI profiler John Douglas, by a firefighter (fans of
scott_lynch's firefighter stories might like this one: it's called Working Fire and was written by Zac Unger), by a tax collector (that one sucked, alas), by a health researcher who studied the lives of Nevada prostitutes (that one rocked, I highly recommend it to the curious -- it's called Brothel.) Very recently I read Garlic and Sapphires by the former NYT restaurant reviewer, Ruth Reichl, and War Reporting for Cowards by Chris Ayres, both of which were excellent.Authenticity is critical in books like this. Coincidences that are amazing and awe-inspiring in real life become eye-roll-inspiring dei ex machina in fiction. Truth is stranger than fiction because truth can be stranger than fiction -- fiction is required to be believable, and reality is under no such obligation. Our hunger for strange stories about reality can be seen in every debunked-by-Snopes urban legend that continues to make the rounds (really! it happened to my cousin's friend!) and the continued strong sales of memoirs.
There are legitimate ways to mix fact and fantasy, but serving fiction as straight-up memoir isn't one of them, and hiring a stand-in to run around as the pretend author because otherwise everyone would view your book as complete and utter tripe isn't, either.
Should I ever write a memoir (unlikely, since I haven't led a particularly exciting life), I will take my cue from my long ago friend and call it my Unauthorized Autobiography. Problem solved.
Edited to change "deus ex machinas" to "dei ex machina" as per my live-in Latin expert. Well, live-in person-who-took-Latin-in-high-school, anyway.
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no subject
Date: 2006-01-12 01:11 am (UTC)Anyway, probably more info than you ever wanted to know, but it's a subject near and dear.
Dillard and Blunt
Date: 2011-12-07 12:06 pm (UTC)Re: Dillard and Blunt
Date: 2011-12-07 01:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-12 01:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-12 07:12 pm (UTC)Chief Seattle (aka Sealth)'s actual speech, or at least the pieces of it that were translated and published when it was given, was pretty much about his people's losses - the many, many deaths, and their sacred lands filled with graves, that the few remaining Native people still lived on - and it is much sadder and more eloquent than the book's made-up environmental message. No matter how beautiful the (wildly inaccurate) illustrations, and how much I agree with the ideas presented, it just still bugs me when I see this book on display in my local library. Which they usually do every year for Earth Week.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-12 07:13 pm (UTC)