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Several months before the shamuses of The Smoking Gun went in search of James Frey’s mug shot, the august house of Farrar, Straus and Giroux published a handsome reissue of Vivian Gornick’s memoir Fierce Attachments. Jonathan Lethem provided an introduction extolling the book for unflinching honesty in its portrayal of the author and her aging, embittered mother. The cover featured a photo of the two women during Gornick’s childhood, caught in an embrace that looked more claustrophobic than compassionate. And on the copyright page, the Library of Congress designated the book a biography.
From the careful package, a reader would never guess that Fierce Attachments might best be described as half-truth, as faction, as docudrama. Speaking during the summer of 2003 at a writers’ conference in Baltimore, Gornick let slip that she had fabricated an unspecified number of scenes in the book, which is built around conversations between herself and her mother as they walk the streets of the Bronx. While in confessional mode Gornick also mentioned that she had pasted together composite characters in articles for the Village Voice. All of this, the author averred, was entirely legitimate within the realm of “personal narrative.”
After one of the aspiring writers who had attended the conference reported Gornick’s disclosures in Salon, the literature professor and book critic Maureen Corrigan addressed the issue in a commentary on Fresh Air, the NPR show. With her voice practically cracking, she framed Gornick’s duplicity not as a matter of artistic license but betrayal. “What lying does do,” she said, “is damage the relationship between reader and memoirist. Autobiography is a genre that is defined solely by a handshake. There’s no internal distinction between an autobiographical novel and an autobiography. Rather, it’s the autobiographer’s pledge to try to tell the truth that makes a reader respond differently . . . . And when this quaint contract turns out to be a con, we feel like rubes.”
The saga of Fierce Attachments, marketed anew just two years after Gornick’s admissions without the slightest candor or shame, makes the James Frey episode the most predictable scandal in the world. As much of the reading public knows by now, The Smoking Gun (thesmokinggun.com) never found Frey’s photo for its feature of mug shots of famous authors because he had never served three months in jail, as he had claimed in his memoir, A Million Little Pieces. What The Smoking Gun did find was that Frey had wildly exaggerated or entirely created various passages in his account of addiction and recovery, which was in the process of selling three and a half million copies as the selection of Oprah Winfrey’s book club.
Far from being an aberration, Frey was merely traveling a well-worn path, especially for tales of personal or familial dysfunction. The most significant revelation is not that he conveniently traversed the border between fiction and nonfiction, factuality and invention, but that the publishing industry purported to see absolutely nothing amiss in his method and offered up a series of self-justifying rationales to excuse it. Ultimately, it took Oprah herself, not the publishing industry, to pull the plug on the pseudo-biography. It took a talk-show hostess to speak up on behalf of all the deceived readers. Most publishers, it is plain, could not care less about conning them.
“Memoir is a personal history whose aim is to illuminate, by way of example, events and issues of broader social consequence,” Frey’s publishing imprint, Doubleday, said in a prepared statement after The Smoking Gun broke the story. “By definition, it is highly personal. In the case of Mr. Frey, we decided A Million Little Pieces was his story, told in his own way, and he represented to us that his version of events was true to his recollections.”
Nan Talese, perhaps the most renowned editor at Doubleday, added her personal defense of Frey in speaking to the reporter Edward Wyatt of The New York Times: “Nonfiction is not a single monolithic category as defined by the best-seller list. Memoir is personal recollection. It is not absolute fact. It’s how one remembers what happened. That is different from history and criticism and biography, and they cannot be measured by the same yardstick.”
Joyce Johnson, a longtime book editor, writing teacher, and memoirist, told Patrick Reardon of the Chicago Tribune, “In a good literary memoir, you’re basically rendering the essence of the experience. Whether someone is called Jane or Susan, who cares?” On other occasions, Johnson has urged memoirists to “exercise imagination.”
Yet the abandonment of accuracy, of evidence, indeed of truth, is not a case of memoir exceptionalism. Though there are distinctions between the various examples, works of history and narrative nonfiction, such as Edmund Morris’s Dutch and John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, freely reveled in similar liberties, doing little damage to the authors’ literary standing and commercial appeal. One can only assume that some editors, publishers, and literary agents privately despair about their profession’s abdication of the entire concept of nonfiction. But only a scant number of them have been willing in the wake of the Frey affair to say so on the record.
One need only compare book publishers’ evasions and justifications to the reactions of news organizations that have been faced with transgressions similar to Frey’s. The disclosures that Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley fabricated elements in their articles led to the fall of the top editors of The New York Times and USA Today, respectively. Both newspapers conducted extensive, penetrating self-examinations to determine what had gone wrong and how the failures could be kept from occurring again. It is inconceivable, hilariously implausible, that The Washington Post would reissue Janet Cooke’s invented portrayal of an eight-year-old heroin addict because it was so well-written and touched on a “larger truth.” Yet very interestingly, some of the same reporters who have been defrocked — David Brock, Michael Finkel, Blair — have been welcomed by the publishing industry with six-figure book contracts. Fame and notoriety, which ought to be antonyms, have become synonymous.
The reasons for the publishing industry’s indifference to factuality start with its business model. A newspaper reporter or a magazine staff writer represents the larger institution, and that institution has a collective stake in the accuracy and rectitude of each individual. A publishing house views an author as a contractor, no more or less the embodiment of the institution than the janitorial contractor who vacuums the halls overnight. And given the nomadic nature of book editors, especially in a period of corporate conglomeration of formerly independent imprints, relatively few authors will stay with a given editor for more than one or two books. Heads will never roll in a publishing house for editorial lapses the way they roll when necessary in a newsroom. Internal investigations will never be undertaken. If anything, the editor who signed up James Frey is probably in line for a bonus, given the memoir’s gigantic sales, even after its fraudulence was revealed.
In the standard processes of a publishing house, a book manuscript never undergoes fact-checking. Copyediting is increasingly out-sourced to freelancers, and their mission is essentially to make the text conform to the house’s standard style. A newspaper or magazine editor can decide how much to trust a writer based on years of having worked together, week in and week out. A book editor may meet a writer once during the acquisition process and a few times for lunch during the development of a manuscript, which hardly offers the basis for the vast amount of latitude given and the minuscule amount of editorial oversight applied.
Speaking from personal experience and from that of fellow authors, I can say that there are some editors who happen to insist on a standard of accuracy, who ask all the penetrating questions. But due diligence in publishing remains an individual editor’s option, not a job requirement or even part of the communal culture. The writer who wants his manuscript to receive the kind of fact-checking it would get from any major magazine either does it himself or pays for it out of his own pocket.
In the conventional publishing contract, the institution seeks to establish its distance from — and its lack of responsibility for — its authors. The author indemnifies the publisher from legal action, even though, as a practical matter, most libel or invasion-of-privacy lawsuits still take aim at the publisher’s deep pockets. The closest thing a book manuscript gets to thorough editing often comes when it is vetted by the publishing house’s lawyer. But the purpose of that scrutiny is to pressure the author to remove any material, whether factual or not, that might get the publisher sued. If an author decides to concoct details of his or her life, as Frey and Gornick did, then the ruse will probably sail right through and into the hands of the unsuspecting reader.
Yet the collapse of the barrier between fiction and nonfiction does matter. It is not just the difference, as Joyce Johnson disingenuously put it, of whether someone is called Jane or Susan. Jane and Susan are not interchangeable labels; they are the names of real people, different people with different histories, personalities, and motivations. A nonfiction author should be limning exactly those defining differences; to fail to do so is to tell a willfully incomplete story and also to be spectacularly lazy. Inventing characters, scenes, and events cannot be excused away as the subjectivity of memory. To “exercise imagination” as Johnson recommends, is to make things up. And, for that matter, why shouldn’t memory, fallible as it is, be put to a test? Mary Karr, author of the acclaimed memoir The Liars’ Club, recognized this when she recalled in a Times op-ed column her own informal research process. In revisiting the events of her turbulent adolescence, she discovered that far from being the victim of a neglectful father, as she remembered having been, she had made a choice to flee home and take up with a gang of drug dealers. This realization gave direction to her entire book. Being true to actuality rather than trusting memory alone changed the story 180 degrees.
Writers do not write only for themselves. The events that Frey inflated or invented — jail time, the suicide of a friend, the severity of his stay in a rehab clinic — went right to the core of his story of debasement and redemption. If he never bottomed out the way he described it and if his recovery was not one long, sadistic humiliation, then he is conning readers, passing off snake oil as an antibiotic.
Fiction isn’t the spackle you use to fill in the cracks of your research. Fiction and nonfiction make fundamentally different compacts with a reader and are held to fundamentally different standards. In return for the freedom to invent, fiction must reach a benchmark of psychological truth. In return for the allegiance to factuality, nonfiction can present what may seem implausible and tell a reader, But that’s what really happened. When John Berendt confessed to inserting fictional material into Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, he tried to shrug off the violation by saying he was merely “rounding the corners” of the narrative, to make it as shapely as possible. But writing nonfiction means having to live with corners that refuse to be rounded.
Since the James Frey scandal erupted, I have yet to hear anyone in publishing offer a persuasive explanation for why writing a biography of oneself or one’s family should be held to less of a standard of factuality than, say, Ron Chernow is when he writes a biography of Alexander Hamilton. I have yet to hear a persuasive argument for why conducting scrupulous research for a memoir or family history should be considered antithetical to high literary achievement. The publishing industry has too much money to gain by holding to the debauched status quo, searching for the next Frey-style blockbuster, willfully forgetting the bit of wisdom that says, If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.
In the end, the readers did revolt. Enough of them complained to Oprah that she dropped A Million Little Pieces from her book club, apologized for her earlier defense of Frey, and interrogated the author on national TV, getting him to admit that he’d inflated his story partly out of a need to look macho and partly because he (correctly) suspected it would sell better. Only after Oprah disowned Frey did his agent and editor scuttle out to say that — heavens to Betsy! — he had told them that everything in the book was true.
I wouldn’t expect anything to change in the publishing industry as a result of Frey’s fall. I wouldn’t expect fact-checking and stringent editing to be suddenly restored to the publishing process. I wouldn’t expect the next batch of my-dysfunctional-family memoirs to come under any more scrutiny than did their lucrative precursors. You can be sure that in the eyes of a good many agents, editors, publishers, and critics, the only mistake James Frey made is that he got caught.
To read the articles in the March/April 2006 issue, click here.
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