Word: memoire
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...stories Frey tells in his 2003 memoir, A Million Little Pieces, are currently in dispute, but that last tale isn't. To date A Million Little Pieces has sold about 3.5 million copies, helped not a little by the fact that Oprah Winfrey chose it as her book club's third nonfiction title. She proclaimed Frey the Man Who Kept Oprah Awake at Night. The only book that sold better than A Million Little Pieces last year was Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Frey's 2005 sequel, My Friend Leonard, didn't do too badly either...
...factual kind. "If you want to have something that can be sold as based on a true story," Coffey says, "you're going to run into guys like James Frey who are embellishing with techniques that are considered a gift in fiction writing but apparently a sin in a memoir...
...defense of his book, Frey invoked the fundamentally subjective nature of the memoir. "It's an individual's perception," he said to King, "my recollection." And he's right. Any memoir is unavoidably filtered through the author's memory and feelings and the inherently impressionistic nature of any literary medium. But before we get lost in an epistemological fog, let's not forget that there's a difference between unavoidable distortions and willful deceptions. Some falsehoods come with the territory of the memoirist; others must be deliberately imported into it. That's a distinction that memoirist Mary Karr, author...
Karr isn't the only memoir writer who's mad as hell. Jeannette Walls, author of The Glass Castle, says she has been losing sleep over it. "What he did is wrong on so many levels, and I'm outraged by it," she fumes. "He lied. Writing a memoir, especially one like he was supposed to have done--or one like I did--is a very personal thing. You sit down, and you write about your innermost feelings and your experiences, and you share them with your readers. When it succeeds, it's a very intimate exchange...
...There's a distinction being made here that's worth scrutinizing. The "subjective retelling" defense invokes the double layer of distortion that's inevitable in any memoir: events are filtered through the author's memory, and then they're fuzzed even further by the inherently impressionistic nature of any literary medium. Short of the unexpected appearance of a Recording Angel, there isn't much a memoirist can do to pull aside that two-ply veil. But before we get lost in an epistemological fog, let's not forget that those distortions must be kept separate from the wilful deceptions...