Word: memoire
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...Templeton Memoir...
...also suspect that the portrait of his mother is partly fanciful. She has the melodramatic sulfur of the mad mom in one of David Sedaris' "memoir" stories, the domineering vindictiveness of a shrew-mother from 40s movies. In fact, she's played in the film by none other than Ann Savage, the virulent megabitch Vera in Edgar G. Ulmer's cheapo noir classic Detour. That was 62 years ago, and now, at 86, she is the icy Queen Maddin, standing in for all the city's overbearing women. (As narrator, he says, "Never underestimate the tenacity of a Winnipeg mother...
Talese had apparently come to the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Writers Conference of the Southwest in Grapevine, Texas, ready to rumble. In an afternoon discussion on Saturday, Talese brought up the issue of Frey's memoir. Saying she was unapologetic about publishing the book, Talese said in her genteel, mid-Atlantic accent that it was Oprah who needed to apologize for her behavior in the affair. Talese argued that Frey, in the gripping manuscript he submitted, had described himself as a liar, a cheater and an addict, and under those circumstances she did not believe she was reading "the New Testament...
...long, esoteric meander through the history of the modern essay. In the midst of her lecture, Oates appeared to make a subtle criticism of Winfrey, whose book club has had a huge effect on the book-selling business. Musing on what truth is within the context of a memoir, Oates seemed to be questioning how Winfrey could pass judgment on the literary worth of an individual's own truth...
...response to emailed questions from TIME, Oates clarified her stance, saying, "the tradition of personal memoir has always been highly 'fictionalized' - colored with an individual's own 'emotional truth' - and that the James Frey memoir would seem to be in this category. It would seem that Oprah Winfrey was judging the memory from a more literal perspective, but this makes sense since the great majority of her readers would expect memoirs and autobiographies to be 'true.'" She says that she has never read Frey's book and that she chooses to write fiction because memoirs today "strain credulity." The novelist...