It seems as though it is time once again for more hand-wringing about the cruel deceptions wrought by authors upon their publishers (and/or by publishers upon a naive and trusting public): another memoir turns out not to be true!
As reported by the New York Times, Love and Consequences, Margaret B. Jones’ memoir ”about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods” has turned out to be in fact the pseudonymous work of Margaret Seltzer ”who is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family,” and who ”graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood.”
Publisher Riverhead Books (a unit of Penguin) is pulling the book from shevles and cancelling the author tour. Sarah McGrath, Seltzer’s editor at Riverhead, is quoted as saying “There’s a huge personal betrayal here as well as a professional one.”
So, the author is set up as villain yet again. Seltzer is hardly an innocent, but, in the words of The Simpsons’ Kent Brockman: “This reporter places all of the blame for this squarely on you, the viewers.” As you destroy a creature’s natural habitat, the canny survivors will try to find their way into new environments. It would seem that the increasing demand for socially conscious “true” memoir reflects the public devaluation of socially conscious fiction. And so, like coyotes and black bears nosing around the cul-de-sacs of our suburbs, fiction writers hungry for scraps of public attention slink into the aisles of Memoir.
As for myself, I’m less interested in why a writer chooses to fabricate a memoir (greed and the desire for attention seem to be the pundits’ favorites) than I am with the public’s obsession with memoir’s “truth” — and I believe there is cause for concern in as much as the cries of outrage at a memoirist’s “lies” bespeak a general distrust of or even disdain for fiction.
A commentary in the L.A. Times today (a link worth reading) touches on this issue:
How many talk shows would have booked Seltzer/Jones if she had forthrightly admitted she was a white writer of imaginative fiction with a social conscience that impelled her to write about gang life in South Los Angeles?
It’s sad enough that this is presented as a rhetorical question. And one has to wonder even beyond the sphere of mass media culture how much this attitude manifests itself even among literary publishers. The “ideology of authenticity” remains strong in literary criticism and academia, and though certainly the desire for “authenticity” has been an engine for combatting oppression and drawing out minority voices, it seems just as often today to be a means of exploitation and imaginative repression. Taken to extremes, insisting upon authorial authenticity denies the possibility of authorial empathy. If you are not writing of your own direct experience, what you are writing cannot be “true.”
The longstanding ancient and medieval view of literature in the West has been that it’s made up of history, fable, and fiction. History is valuable because it tells us what happened and what we can learn from it. Fable is valuable because it provides us with examples of right moral conduct. Fiction is good only for light entertainment and diversion, which to many a devout medieval mind meant is was good for nothing, if not indeed actively dangerous to one’s spiritual life.
Is the pendulum of culture swinging back to towards a variation on this attitude? If one takes the temperature of popular opinion by what appears in internet discussions, it is not at all difficult to find online conversations about the socio-political meanings of movies and television shows constantly interrupted by posters genuinely castigating the others with cries of “It’s just a movie!” As if taking a fictional narrative seriously is the height of foolishness.
(In some ways I would love to be able to point to posters who interject with “It’s just a book” — but books don’t seem to merit even that level of attention anywhere other than niche literary forums.)
And so I would like to add this one additional motive to the list of reasons why a writer might scratch through “a novel” and write “a memoir” — the desire to be taken seriously. That may well not excuse the writer’s deception, but I think it directs us back to the source of the problem: the standards of the audience.
At the end of the NYT article, Sarah McGrath is quoted as saying “There was a way to do this book honestly and have it be just as compelling.” But one seriously questions whether or not McGrath would have found a market for it.
2 responses so far ↓
1
Patrick Lane
// Mar 5, 2008 at 6:58 pm
I suppose it’s somewhat bad form to comment on your own post — like laughing at your own joke — but an particular exception to the situation painted above occurred to me: historical fiction.
A lot of people seem very invested in research-derived authenticity even in fictional narratives when it comes to talking about the past (at least the past that is beyond living memory). I remember sitting in the audience at an AWP panel about research, where one audience member became politely irate when one of the panelists (alas, I recall not who) said that if a particular historical fact (like a precise date or weather condition or location of a particular historical figure at a particular time) didn’t serve the larger narrative purpose, then the writer should feel perfectly free to fudge that fact. “After all, we’re writing fiction,” the author said (or words to the like effect). The audience member responded with a moderately impassioned plea that the because the reader is relying on us for an accurate picture of the past and because it’s our obligation to do justice to the dead by rendering their time period with rigorous correctness therefore the fudging of facts is a kind of artistic crime.
Here, truth isn’t linked to the authenticity of the author’s personal experience, but instead to the integrity of a kind of journalistic research. But in both cases, “truth” is dependent upon some form of measurable and recorded “actuality.”
In fact, thinking about that, authenticity itself isn’t to blame for this shifting understanding of artistic truth — it’s the idea that the need for “authenticity” has bled over to the need for “actuality.” After all, James Frey has “authenticity” on his side as someone who genuinely battled addiction — his story is authentic (and true) to his own experience, but it was not “actual” (or “true”) according to the objective record of the events of his life.
–Patrick
2
melwest
// Mar 9, 2008 at 5:20 pm
There is a demographic argument sounded by Philip Lopate as to our disaffection with contemporary fiction. “The older I get, the less I can tolerate fiction’s contrivances.” It’s not known what kind of traction this argument has among the boomer generation (the most populous in U.S. history).
We are constantly bombarded by literary agents who tell us they must be passionate about the fiction they agent. I read a review in Publishers Weekly about a novel featuring, in the magazine’s words, “buckets of blood” and “cat torture”. If you are passionate about buckets of blood and cat torture, you are not a literary agent. You are a psychopath. Contrivances of contemporary fiction. Impossible to abide by.
I also say the publisher who claimed the most recent fraudulent memoir was a personal and a professional betrayal is being disengenous. That same publisher engaged, only it knows how long, in a global quest to find the latest victim fiction of the “woe is me” variety and it seems poetic justice that they get hoisted on their own petard. For me, a matter of the chickens coming home to roost.
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